Forum on Race and Genomics

Extract

‘All of this study of genotypes will have profound consequences on our understanding of race and ethnicity’, Francis Collins, Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, warned his colleagues in 2003. At BioSocieties, we have been committed to bringing the perspectives of the social sciences to bear on the charged issues at hand. In September 2006 (Vol. 1, Part 3), we published our first forum on race and genomics, where we focused on larger questions raised by the decision of Nature Genetics to publish a special open-access supplement—Genetics for the Human Race—in November 2004, concerned with the topic of human genome variation and the continuing validity of the concept of ‘race’. In the forum, sociologist Andrew Smart and colleagues analysed the contributions to that supplement, as well as interview material from the three editors behind it, to tease out the larger methodological, scientific and ethical dilemmas that scientists in the thick of genomics and race research perceived themselves to face. Charmaine D.M. Royal, one of the contributors to Genetics for the Human Race, then responded to the issues raised by Smart and colleagues.