Pulver Science

The passage argues that it is far too easy to fall into the “race pit,” which refers to using thinking of race as a biological concept. It takes a lot of unlearning and relearning to realize that race does not divide humans genetically, because there are no subspecies of human. We are all extremely genetically similiar to one another.

There have been many instances of misuse of race, such as when scientists used race to try to justify why African Americans tended to have higher atheltic abilities, or when trying to puzzle out which races had higher IQs. In addition, t has been concluded that African Americans tended to have lower birth weights and higher rates of infant mortality due to environmental conditions, not genetics.

Despite race being a biological fiction, race still affects everyone’s lived experiences. These physical differences that have originated in the history slavery have divided people for centuries, resulting in people of color having lower life expectancies, and higher rates of cancer or other illnesses linked to environmental factors. Race is a biological fiction, but racial divisions are very real and affects people’s outlooks on life.

“Race and Gene Studies: What Differences Make a Difference?” by Larry Aldelman explores recent discoveries of racial difference that highlight differential rates of diseases or responses to a drug, and comments on the belief of biological race. 

In a 2002 report published in Science magazine, Noah Rosenberg, Marcus Feldman and others analyzed the variation in 377 different DNA sequences from 1056 individuals from around the world. They found that 95% of the DNA variation they studied is due to differences between individuals within any continent. However, they also found they could use the remaining 5% of the variation as genetic “footprints.” These footprints would indicate the continent from which an individual’s recent ancestors came. Though some scholars were quick to interpret these findings as though the ancient notions were correct, further questions such as “why should our interpretations of the evidence matter?” were actually raised. Interpretations matter because confusions like conflating DNA markers of ancestry with markers of race, mistaking more common gene variants in some populations as a sign of racial difference, and assuming disparities are attributed to genetic differences between races, arise. 

In response to Giovanna’s post about the misuse of race in medical diagnosis, I agree that we must be very careful to describe every variable of a patient’s ancestry accurately in the range of possible diagnoses. Ancestry has important implications in genetics and healthcare. People tend to want to know if they are descended from a population at risk for certain diseases. Adelman argues that doctors’ temptation to use race in treatments is an unreliable surrogate for everyone’s unique ancestry. 

Though now we know that race may be a biological myth and social constriction, it unfortunately problematically persists in our society. For example, it was long assumed that the high rates of hypertension among African Americans was a genetic marker of their nature, until studies found that West Africans have among the world’s lowest hypertension rates. If healthcare professions focused on race as innate biology, they could have overlooked social factors like stress, that might have contributed to the initial study that said African Americans had high hypertension. Thus, the main argument of this article is that race matters. Not race as in genetics, but race as in lived experience. Social race, shaped by the social institutions and practices in place, is an important factor that health researchers need to take into account.

A few months ago I was watching Grey’s Anatomy, and one of the storylines was about one of the doctors misdiagnosing a patient. The doctor thought the patient had appendicitis, but he was suffering from right-sided diverticulitis. The misdiagnosis happened because right-sided diverticulitis is more prominent in Asian patients, but the protocols do not account for this fact and lead doctors to classify these symptoms as appendicitis.

While not everything that happens in medical shows is trustworthy, this is a common reality. On one side, doctors misdiagnose patients because the patients do not show the physical traits associated with the population for which the disease is the most common. On the other side, patients are misdiagnosed because the protocols are made for white people, and do not account for the genetic, ethnic, cultural, or geographical variables. This is what the article “The Misuse of Race in Medical Diagnosis”, by the pediatrician and an assistant professor of pediatrics Richard S. Garcia, talks about. The Mexican doctor brings two examples of misdiagnosis: a girl with cystic fibrosis, and a man with a cyst inside his skull. Both of them were misdiagnosed because of incorrect assumptions based on race.

The main argument of the text is that, if a patient’s ancestry can narrow the range of possible diagnoses, we must be careful to describe the variables accurately. Additionally, we cannot assume that, just because the diagnosis is not common for certain backgrounds, it will never happen. And, finally, the writer asks that when “race” cannot possibly matter, we should omit it.

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