Word: race
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That conclusion, critics quickly responded, was flawed. "Race is a sociological concept, not a biological category," says Otis Brawley, the chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study. "But this study brings race into medicine as a biological categorization." According to the Human Genome Project, people are indeed well over 99% identical; at the molecular level race is imperceptible. But even while Albain's and other similar studies don't do much to shift the prevailing medical opinion - that disparities in health are fueled mainly by socioeconomics and access to care - they remind...
...sure, no one is accusing authors like Albain of racism, and people on both sides of the debate want to save lives. But the treatment of race by some medical researchers continues to create a stir. Lisa Carey, a breast cancer specialist at the University of North Carolina, believes that biological differences may well contribute to differences in health, such as the one Albain found, but that any discussion of race turns automatically contentious. "The idea of differences between races has been fraught with misuse over the years, and not just in medicine. Everyone is leery that it could...
...Albain's part, she says race is a surrogate for unknown genes - which, scientists agree, play a significant role in health outcomes. "When we find out what the [genetic] 'it' is, we will be able to test everyone for 'it' and we will find some Caucasians who have it and some blacks who don't and we won't be talking about black and white anymore," she says. Still, geneticists point out that hereditary traits follow ancestral lines, not racial ones. And race in America, as it is socially defined, constitutes such broad categories that it is a crude - arguably...
...Williams, a Harvard professor of public health and African American studies. "The biology is a fall-back black box that many researchers use when they find racial differences," he says. "It is knee-jerk reaction. It is not based on science, but on a deeply held, cultural belief about race that the medical field has a hard time giving...
This is a uniquely American phenomenon, experts say. In other countries, information about race is usually not available to medical researchers, as it isn't collected in census data or in birth and death certificates. In some countries, such as Canada, medical researchers can choose to ask about race, but in other places - France, for example - researchers have a hard time winning approval for any study that specifically involves participants' race. Meanwhile, in the U.S., not only is racial data ubiquitous, its inclusion is mandated by the government in certain medical studies. The 1994 National Institutes of Health Revitalization...