Human Diversity, Genes, and Medicine - Brutes or Angels: Human Possibility in the Age of Biotechnology - page 135

in summary, the AAA statement describes race as a social construct
invented in the eighteenth century to facilitate the subjugation of native
Americans and persons taken from Africa to be slaves. it notes that human
variation occurs in gradations without discrete geographical boundaries.
for example, skin color is not just black or white, but occurs in all shades
of color that are not restricted to persons indigenous to particular places.
in 2004, just after leading the international human Genome sequenc-
ing Consortium (ihGsC) to completion of the final draft of the human ge-
nome, francis Collins published an essay titled “What We Do and Don't
Know about 'race,' 'ethnicity,' Genetics, and health at the Dawn of the
Genome era.” Collins's piece is a summation of a 2003 meeting of sociolo-
gists, historians, anthropologists, and geneticists at the national human
Genome Center at howard University on the topic, called “human Ge-
nome variation and 'race.'” Collins acknowledges that race and ethnicity are
terms lacking agreed-upon definitions. he then makes two observations:
(1) analyses of genetic variation can fairly accurately predict a person's geo-
graphic origin if the person's grandparents all came from the same part of
the world, and (2) ancestral origins often have a correlation, although not
necessarily precise, with self-identiied race. These observations are incon-
sistent with the claim that race has absolutely no biological correlates. re-
flecting on human diversity and disease, Collins observes that the frequen-
cies of occurrence of many genetic variants differ in different regions of the
world. some such variants may be associated with disease.
But genetic factors are not the only cause for health disparities between
populations. Collins acknowledges that many health disparities are due to
environmental factors such as diet, education, access to health care, stress,
social marginalization, discrimination, and such. Collins concludes that a
research priority for medical genomics ought to be working to understand
the fundamental genetic and environmental causes of health and disease so
that we can move beyond using race as a surrogate for disease risk. As di-
rector of the national institutes of health (nih), Collins is in a position
to institutionalize this priority.