 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
Bioethics Lecture
08/02/05 - 4:00 PM - Lillie Auditorium
"A Post-Genomic Surprise: The Increasing Significance of Race in Debates and Practical Applications of Human Molecular Genetics"
Troy Duster, Ph.D., New York University
Sponsored by Drs. Gerald and Ruth Fischbach
At a March, 2000 news conference at the White House, President Clinton and Prime Minister Blair jointly hosted and celebrated the completion of the "first draft" of the full map and sequence of the human genome, and Francis Collins and Craig Venter stepped forward to agree on one thing—that the Human Genome Project provided definitive evidence that racial categories have no meaning at the level of the DNA. The oft-quoted figure of "we are all 99.9 per cent alike" at the DNA level became a mantra for the next few years. However, at the same time, there was a "turn to difference" in the new fields of pharmacogenomics and pharmacotoxicology, aided by supercomputers and the capacity to do SNP profiles of the (at least) three million points of difference between any two individuals—at the DNA level. This has generated a huge debate, culminating in the approval by the FDA in late June of the first race-based drug, BiDil, about the role of race in clinical medicine. In addition, the whole arena of "ancestral informative markers" has burgeoned, both as "recreational" knowledge about ancestral origins, but as well in forensics, as a means of predicting the race of a crime suspect based upon tissue samples left at a crime scene. These converging developments are ushering in a new era of the reinscription of race as a category in biology, clinical medicine, and forensics, and the implications for social science and public policy are significant.
Troy Duster is Professor of Sociology at New York University and he also holds an appointment as Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. From 1996 to 1998, he served as member and then chair of the joint NIH/DOE advisory committee on Ethical, Legal and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project (The ELSI Working Group). He is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Social Science Research Council, and last year served as chair of the Board of Directors of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. He is currently the President of the American Sociological Association. He is the former Director of the American Cultures Center and the Institute for the Study of Social Change, both at the University of California, Berkeley. Duster’s relevant books and monographs include Cultural Perspectives on Biological Knowledge (co-edited with Karen Garrett), Backdoor to Eugenics, (2nd ed, 2003), and most recently, Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Colorblind Society (co-author Brown, et al., 2003).
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
