Genetic Research

15 Feb Should Human Genetics Focus on Ancestry Rather Than Race?

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: [caption id="attachment_21589" align="alignleft" width="200"] Dr. Michael Yudell[/caption] Michael Yudell, PhD, MPH Chair & Associate Professor Drexel University School of Public Health Community Health and Prevention Philadelphia, PA 19104 Medical Research: What is the background for this study? Dr. Yudell: We came together as a group of scholars from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities to address what we believe is a long-standing challenge: how to improve the study of human genetic diversity without recapitulating the controversial and problematic concept of race. We believe that the cross-disciplinary focus of our work—an examination of the historical, biological, and sociological aspects of the race concept—can shed new light on the long-standing debate about the use of the race concept in genetics research. We believe modern genetics remains stuck in a paradox: that on the one hand race is a tool to elucidate human genetic diversity, and on the other hand race is believedthree main concerns to be a poorly defined marker of that diversity and an imprecise proxy for the relationship between ancestry and genetics. This paradox is rooted in the nature of the field: it dates back to the evolutionary geneticist Theodosius Dozhansky, who in the 1930s redefined race in his work on what was known as biology’s evolutionary synthesis (the synthesis of population genetics with Darwinian thought). For much of his career, Dobzhansky believed race to be a useful tool to elucidate human genetic diversity. But by the end of his career he became worried that the study of human diversity had “floundered in confusion and misunderstanding” and was concerned over the nonscientific misuse of the term. He, like we and many others in genetics, anthropology, and the social sciences, have called on the field to devise better methods to improve the study of human genetic diversity. Can the race concept in genetics elucidate the relationship between humans and their evolutionary history, between humans and their health? In the wake of the human genome project the answer seemed to be a pretty resounding “no.” In 2004, for example, Francis Collins, then head of the National Human Genome Research Institute and now Director of the National Institutes of Health called race a “flawed” and “weak” concept and argued that science needed to move beyond race. Yet, as our paper highlights, the use of race persist in genetics, despite voices like Collins, like Craig Venter—leaders in the field of genomics-who have called on the field to move beyond it. They, of course, were not the first to do, but we hope they are among the last. We believe it is time to revisit this century-long debate and bring biologists, social scientists, and scholars from the humanities together in a to find better ways to study the ever-important subject of human diversity.