[T]he races of man are not sufficiently distinct to inhabit the same country without fusion; and the absence of fusion affords the usual and best test of specific distinctiveness.The subspecies is merely a strictly utilitarian classificatory device for the pigeonholing of population samples.Did human evolutionary history lead to a natural division of our species into subspecies, the so-called biological human races? The issue seemed to have been beaten to death during the second half of the 20th century. But the situation (...) in the biological sciences changed significantly with the rise of genomic science at the close of the century. The issue of race in science, which most people had deemed passé and obsolete, has .. (shrink)

The utility of a notion testifies not to its clarity but rather to the philosophic importance of clarifying it. Even mistaken hypotheses and theories are of use in leading to discoveries. This remark is true in all the sciences. The genomic revolution raised hopes that the putative utility of race in biomedicine could be grounded in the view that race has a biological reality and scientific validity (Burchard et al. 2003; Risch et al. 2002). However, the rebuttal of the contention (...) that race is a biological category has been sharp among genomic scientists (Cooper, Kaufman, and Ward 2003; Long and Kittles 2003; Serre and Pääbo 2004). Some researchers worry about the reification of race in science and .. (shrink)

Individualized care and equality of care remain two imperatives for formulating any scientifically and morally informed public health policy. Yet both continue to be elusive goals, even in the age of genomics, proteomics, and evidence-based medicine. Nonetheless, with the rapid growth and improvement of human biotechnologies, the need to individualize therapies while allocating medical care equally may result partly from our biological constitution. Human beings are all unique, and their biological differences significantly influence variability in disease causation and therapeutic response (...) to treatments. However, because humans have equal moral worth, there is no ethically justifiable reason to establish an a .. (shrink)