Genomes, race and health

Race, race-based discrimination, and health outcomes among African Americans.

Persistent and vexing health disadvantages accrue to African Americans despite decades of work to erase the effects of race discrimination in this country. Participating in these efforts, psychologists and other social scientists have hypothesized that African Americans' continuing experiences with racism and discrimination may lie at the root of the many well-documented race-based physical hea...

Individual genomes instead of race for personalized medicine.

The cost of sequencing and genotyping is aggressively decreasing, enabling pervasive personalized genomic screening for drug reactions. Drug-metabolizing genes have been characterized sufficiently to enable practitioners to go beyond simplistic ethnic characterization and into the precisely targeted world of personal genomics. We examine six drug-metabolizing genes in J. Craig Venter and James ...

Race, Ethnicity Health Care

Epigenetic Biopolitics: Race, Population, and Environmental Health

Reading the US government’s current warning and advice regarding fish consumption, one would have little hint that race might be important in this environmental health matter. Issued jointly by the EPA and FDA, the advice aims to protect fetuses and young children from the harm that even low doses of methylmercury can cause to brain development (US FDA and US EPA 2004). Because fish is the main...

Race and Race Theory