Talk:Race in biomedicine

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Contents

[edit] Existing race based medicine

Existing and approved race based treatment of heart disease http://www.cnn.com/2005/HEALTH/conditions/06/17/racial.pill.ap/index.html?section=cnn_us. I consider it is worth including in article.

[edit] Race in Brazil

As the reviewer and editor of this article (I have not only wikified it, but also added several contributions), I strongly disagree with the arbitrary removal of a paragraph, based on the prejudice against Brazil, a country which is a leader of biomedical research in Latin America (see Brazilian publication statistics in http://www.pubmed.com, especially on race issues. See the literature on population genetics by internationally respected authors such as Salzano and Penna. Besides, the paragraph is not a reference to scientific work, but a real case of the meaninglessness of race definitions based on color and/or male-line genetic similarities. I am adjunct professor of Medical Genetics of the Medical School of the State University of Campinas, which is superior in quality to many schools in the so-called developed countries. Therefore, I have reinstated the paragraph. User:Rsabbatini

Reference: Callegari-Jacques SM, Grattapaglia D, Salzano FM, Salamoni SP, Crossetti SG, Ferreira ME, Hutz MH.: Historical genetics: spatiotemporal analysis of the formation of the Brazilian population. Am J Hum Biol. 2003 Nov-Dec;15(6):824-34.

Okay, maybe that paragraph is fine, but it needs some revision because I can't understand it. I'll tell you what I got from it, then you can fix it (or explain what I should have gotten and I can fix it).

1) In the Brazilian census, the government let people write in their skin color as a means of assessing race.
2) People wrote in all sorts of things.
[logic missing]
5ish) Race is meaningless in Brazil.

An alternative interpretation I have:

1) In the Brazilian census, the government gathered data on skin color as well as some other indicator of race.
2) The two are not well-correlated.
3) Skin color is not a good determiner of race.

Clearly, I'm confused. My roommate also can't make sense of it. So a revision would be nice. LizardWizard 00:46, Jan 27, 2005 (UTC)

The topic of race in Brazil is covered in the the race article, and seems less appropriate here where the topic is about race (however it is defined by researchers) and biomedicine. --Rikurzhen 00:48, Jan 27, 2005 (UTC)

Interestingly, I did as you suggested -- a PubMed search -- for "(Campinas[Affiliation]) AND Race[Text Word]". There are 28 hits, a number of which are biomedical studies in which "race" is a factor in the study design. So as to the question of biomedicine and race in Brazil, we can say that some biomedical researchers in Brazil use some concept of race in their research. Unless there is something in addition to the detail in the race article about the concept of race in Brazil, I don't see the need to bring special attention to it here. --Rikurzhen 01:49, Jan 27, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] genetic labeling

I removed the middle paragraph about genetic clusters being unreliable and thus proving race doesn't exist. That isn't the topic of this section, and that idea is covered in detail in the race article. We really should restrict this article to the material that is too specific to make it into the main race article. There's no need to rehash that article in this one -- else we'll just have two nearly identical articles with slightly different topics. --Rikurzhen 20:05, Jan 29, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] future work

Some specific results from medical association studies would be helpful here so that the discussion is less abstract about what medicine is at stake here. --Rikurzhen 20:09, Jan 29, 2005 (UTC)

high frequency, highly penetrant, monogenic traits:

  • HbS allele in sub-Saharan Africans and Southern Europeans -- Haemochromatosis
  • C282Y-HFE and Delta508-CFTR alleles in Northern Europeans -- Cystic fibrosis

complex traits:

  • incidence and death rate: prostate and breast cancers significantly higher in African–Americans than European–Americans
  • increased susceptibility to both obesity and abnormal levels of insulin secretion associated with higher proportions of individual African ancestry (admixture mapping)
  • heart disease, high blood pressure higher in African-Americans than European-Americans
  • diabetes risk factor -- Hispanic, American Indian, African American, Pacific Island, and South Asian ancestry

common allele/common variant:

  • allele of apolipoprotein E (APO epsilon 4) -- frequent in Africans, Asians and Europeans -- associated in a dose-dependent manner with susceptibility to Alzheimer's disease

Epistasis:

  • the increased risk that is associated with homozygosity for APOepsilon4 is 5-fold higher in individuals with Asian rather than African ancestry
  • polymorphisms in 5' regulatory region of CCR5 gene -- in HIV infected, influence the rate of progression to AIDS and death
  • some CCR5 haplotypes beneficial in multiple populations, others, the effect is population-specific
  • one CCR5 haplotype (HHE) associated with delayed disease progression in European–Americans, but accelerated disease progression in African–Americans
  • 3 variants in CARD15 associated with Crohn's disease -- inflammatory bowel disorder -- in European–Americans -- but none of these variants or other variants in CARD15 have been associated with Crohn disease in African–Americans or Asians

[edit] Sickle-cell disease

Shouldn't something about blacks and sickle cell anemia be in this article?--69.243.125.36 19:27, 19 September 2005 (UTC)

No - There sould be something about mixed race and anemia 87.194.35.230 18:15, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] This article contradicts itself

Throughout the article (with the exception of the section "Genetic differences among races"), it conflates "race" with "ethnicity." These are two fundamentally different concepts and are defined differently in the literature. In short:

"Race" is involuntary and presumed to be biological. An African American, a Trinidadian, and a Puerto Rican of precisely the same Euro-African genetic admixture would presumably be of the same "race" (whatever it would be). Similarly, Carol Channing, Gregory Howard Williams, and Geraldo Rivera would be of the same "race" because each has but one mulatto grandparent.

"Ethnicity" is voluntary and presumed to be cultural. Virtually all African Americans, Trinidadians, and Puerto Ricans would agree that they are of different ethnicities given that they differ in language, religion, folklore, music, dance, children's tales, traditional clothing and foods, etc. Similarly, Carol Channing self-identifies and is accepted by U.S. society as being of the "White" ethnicity, Gregory Howard Williams self-identifies and is accepted by U.S. society as being of the "Black" ethnicity, and Geraldo Rivera self-identifies and is accepted by U.S. society as being of the "Hispanic" (Puerto Rican) ethnicity.

The only section of this article that even addresses this conflation ("Genetic differences among races") assumes that H. sapiens is habitat-limited to the United States of America by saying "In general, genetic clusters exist that correspond tightly to the census definition of race and to self-identified ancestry." This implies that the U.S. census (which by law must conform to the U.S. endogamous color line) is an authority on how people around the globe self-identify. This notion is patently false, given that the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of Brazil, Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, etc. see themselves as "White." And even the exceptions to the article's claim of race/ethnicity equivalence (South, Central, West Asians, and Hisanics) mention only populations with large U.S. political constituenceis. The simple obvious fact is that every nation on the planet save the United States could be exhibited as an exception to the equivalence of U.S.-perceived "race" and U.S.-perceived "ethnicity". -- Frank W Sweet 14:20, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Huh? I get the race/ethnicity distinction. I just don't see the conflation in this article. --Rikurzhen 23:19, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Here are some examples:

  • The first paragraph under "The effects of racial and ethnic identities on health" mixes frequencies due to cultural traits with those due to continent of ancestry.
  • In the same section, the paragraph starting, "However, differences in allele frequencies" refers to monogenic diseases as related to "groups categorized by race or ethnicity" as well to ancestal heredity, as if the Amish, and the Ashkenazi (the only populations mentioned) were distinct "races." To my knowledge, nobody sees the Amish as a separate "race" and most USAmericans have not considered Ashkenazim to be a separate "race" since the mid 1940s.
  • The first paragraph under "Population substructure in genetics research" opens with "One area in which racial and ethnic categories can be important considerations..." and yet its content deals only with genetic markers, and genetic markers align with neither "racial" nor "ethnic" categories anywhere, to say nothing of the fact that "racial" and "ethnic" categories partly align only in the United States.
  • The first paragraph under "Disease association studies" opens with "Race is associated with differential disease succeptibility..." but its content shows that HbS is common in Southern Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans on the one hand but rare in northern Europeans on the other. Surely, nobody claims that Southern Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans are one "race" and northern Europeans are another.
  • The same paragraph also shows that CF is rare in Southern Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans on the one hand but common in northern Europeans on the other. Again, given first words of the paragraph, it seems to be suggesting that Southern Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans are one "race" and northern Europeans are another.
  • In the same section, the paragraph on CCR5 fails to mention that the "race" of the subjects/patients in (Gonzalez, et al., 1999) was determined via a questionnaire.
  • The table titled "Diseases that differ in frequency by race or ethnicity" conflates the concepts by failing to indicate which diseases correlate with U.S. socio-political ethnicity, which ones correlate with U.S. socio-political "race" (which are themselves very different things), which ones correlate with New World continent-of-ancestr admixture, and which ones show specific genetic predisposition.

It seems to me that there are three distinct phenomena involved in "improving the prevention and treatment of diseases" by studying demographics. First, are the (U.S. only) correlations between diseases and U.S. ethnicity (e.g.: obesity in Afro-Americans, coronary disease in Euro-Americans). Second, are the (throughout the New World) correlations between diseases and continent-of-ancestry admixture (skin cancers, dementia). Third, are the (universal) genetic diseases specific to a particular allele group, regardless of U.S. ethnicity, regardless of continent-of-ancestry admixture.

Tell you what. Let my try to tweak the article to reflect that, in fact, three different correlations are being sought in demographic biomedicine today: US ethnicity, New World continent of ancestry, and universal genetic predisposition. I shall also try to show that one of the problems faced by researchers today is figuring out which of the three any particular study examined because the use of vague "racial" terminology has become so ubiquitous. -- Frank W Sweet 14:38, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

I believe it is well accepted, at least among those who study evolution, that all sub-species levels of classification are necessarily arbitrary. While U.S. law fixes a deterministic notion of race, this is not necessary or appropriate for biomedicine. Thus, Amish can be a "race" if you want it to be for the sake of a particular study. Often, this confusion is avoided by using the term "population", which does not carry the baggage of folk ideas about what are the true racial groups. So, it would be the Amish population. Clearly, a group like the Amish (or Ashkenazi) are different from other groups for both social and genetic reasons.
Many of your complaints appear to be directed at the actual use of race in biomedicine, rather than at this article itself, which must report things as they are, not as we would like them to be.
You are mistaken to claim that genetic markers align with ethnicity only in the U.S. It's been suggested in the literature that given enough markers you should be able to separate any arbitrarily fine ancestry relationship down to single people. As most ethnic groups are historically endagomous, they would be subject to this process. An example was Rosenberg et al's (2002) ability to differentiate the Kalash from their neighbors when they started cranking up the number of clusters in their world-wide analysis of allele frequencies. Bamshad's work in India also comes to mind. However, as a matter of the fact that the plurality of biomedical rearch is done in the U.S., there is more information about U.S. ethnic groups than any other -- perhaps this is what you're observing.
Your three categories sounds a lot like an original research project. Be mindful of that problem. --Rikurzhen 18:14, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

You wrote: "Many of your complaints appear to be directed at the actual use of race in biomedicine, rather than at this article itself, which must report things as they are, not as we would like them to be." Upon further consideration, I agree with you. My initial objection was indeed about the practice rather than the article. As you say, we are pretty well stuck with reporting things as they are. Nevertheless, I think that we can present published arguments against vague or unintelligible "racial" terminology.

Your observation regarding the link between genetic markers and ethnicity, illustrates the problem that I am talking about. Where "ethnicity" is defined as a population that has been endogamous long enough to show distinctive markers, then of course they correlate--they are the same thing. But where ethnicity is a subject's answer to a U.S. questionnaire (Hispanic, Italian-American, German-American, Irish-American, etc.) it does not reflect anything genetic because most of these are socio-political umbrella terms that originated within the U.S. and comprise many diverse genetic populations. For example, outside the U.S., no Mexican or Puerto Rican would consider himself ethnically related to the other and in fact they are genetically dissimilar. (See Bertoni et al., "Admixture in Hispanics: Distribution of Ancestral Population Contributions in the Continental United States," Human Biology, February 2003, v. 75, no. 1, pp. 1–11.)

Regarding the risk of NOR, I am sensitive to your concern. In fact, what drew my attention to this was that, for another article entirely, I collected numerous peer-reviewed articles complaining about this very problem--that too many recent studies are virtually unintelligible because they claim to correlate some disease or other with "race" or "ethnicity" but then fail to explain just how they measured or even defined "race" or "ethnicity." What I want to do is show, for each study cited in the article, whether it correlated its disease with questionnaire self-identity, with Afro-Euro-Amerind admixture ratio, or with gene variants. For studies where you simply cannot tell what they were measuring, I would quote from the many articles complaining about that very thing. It seems to me the that "complaining about things as they are" is fair game if we are simply quoting from the many professionals in the field who are also "complaining about things as they are." (Studies that are unintelligible due to vague undefined population classification terminology.)

On another note, I have a problem with the article's sources. I wanted to read the sources cited in the article's parenthetical references to see if they explained their terminology. But I have been unable to find many of those sources. Their bibliography entries at the bottom of the article have apparently fallen into the bit bucket. So far, I have been unable to locate in pubmed or anywhere else: (Hummer et al. 2004), (Mahoney and Michalek 1998), (Rawlings and Weir 1992), (Franzini et al. 2001), (Cooper et al. 1997), (Fang et al. 1998), (Cooper et al. 2003), (Cooper 2004), (Platz et al. 2000), or (Mountain and Risch 2004). Can you suggest anything? -- Frank W Sweet 19:10, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Quick note -- First check here for the missing references. Check race. Lots of copying back and forth was done. If they're not there ... look at a ~6 month older version of race to see if they're there. --Rikurzhen 19:20, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
I wholly endorse adding to the article published discussion about the sloppiness with which these terms are used. Mountain and Risch (2004) treats this a bit. --Rikurzhen 19:21, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Okay. I have modified the article to satisfy my abovementioned concerns. Actually, rather than mess with the existing Race in biomedicine, I copied the text into a new article titled Population groups in biomedicine and made my changes there. I wanted to change the title because I thought the old one was off-putting. If you agree, then please examine and edit the new article and, when done, we can simply redirect the old one to the new one. If you disagree with the title change, then then please examine and edit the new article and, when done, we can simply copy its text back into the old one. -- Frank W Sweet 16:26, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] lead section needs an upgrade

the lead section hasn't been changed as the article has grown in content. it should be rewritten to function as a summary. --Rikurzhen 18:35, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] FrankWSweet's Proposed Changes Population groups in biomedicine

the terminology section has NPOV problem -- it states opinions as true rather than attributing them. we've also lost the debate that's summarized in Risch et al 2002 [1] --Rikurzhen 05:07, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

Let me me take your two sentences above one at a time. I am now addressing only, "the terminology section has NPOV problem." I shall come back to Risch et al after we resolve this first issue.

Could you please be more specific? You say that the section has a WP:NPOV problem, but WP:NPOV usually means that the editor has cited sources for only one side of a debate and has neglected to cite sources for the other side(s) of the debate. But then you also say that it "states opinions as true rather than attributing them," and this is usually considered a violation of WP:V or perhaps WP:NOR. Which is it? Does the proposed text cite too many sources on only one side of a debated issue, or does it fail to cite sufficient sources?

  1. If you are saying the former (one-sided WP:NPOV), could you please tell me what is the issue being debated and which is the side that is now being neglected? I shall be happy to find sources for the "other side" (whatever it may be).
  2. If you are saying the latter (inadequate sources WP:V or WP:NOR), could you please mark any specific "opinion" sentences with {{fact}} tags so that I can address them? At first glance, the section cites sources after virtually every paragraph and, in some paragraphs, even after every sentence.

Please help me out here. I want to contribute to the article and improve it, but I cannot do so unless I understand specifically just what is your concern. -- Frank W Sweet 12:13, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

The issue is predominately that there are summarizing sentences which make a commitment one way or another on issues where there is some controversy. You could say that this is due to #2 proximally and perhaps #1 distally. I'll try to annotate the text with tags. --Rikurzhen 17:24, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

Okay. I have added footnotes everywhere that you tagged, with four exceptions (more about the four exceptions in a moment). In most cases, this simply meant copying a footnote upstream one sentence. But in a couple of cases I added new sources. I do not think that any of the citations discuss data findings that are questioned or debated in any way. Certainly, the descriptions of ancestry-informative admixture scatter diagrams (which you seem to have a problem with) are undisputed in the literature. In any event, if you see any new citations that now look controversial or one-sided, please mark them with *NPOV*.
The four exceptions are:
  • And whether any such classification scheme matches any particular individual's notion of "race" depends entirely upon the individual.
    • [the word "entirely" is the problem]
  • The problem is that every "racial" label unavoidably drags in historical connotations.
    • [the word "unavoidably" is the problem]
  • Only in the United States is, "Yes," considered an acceptable answer by some.
    • [the notion that "only" in the U.S. is this considered acceptable is the problem -- i imagine there is a continuum of "yes" being an acceptable answer]
  • Studies that ignore the distinction are less than credible.
    • "less than credible" is a strong opinion that i'm sure is not universally shared
The first one is a tautology. The second is common knowledge. The third and fourth are conclusions drawn from the preceding sentences. Would you be satisfied if I were to simply drop those four sentences altogether? -- Frank W Sweet 18:40, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

You could do that. I don't mean to pick because you've made an excellent contribution, which obviously took considerable effort. I do think there is need for some balancing of wording and emphasis, with an eye towards representing the view found in Risch et al (2002) and similar works. This is something I don't really have time for now, but we could mark as an item "to do". --Rikurzhen 20:04, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

I annotated the four sentences above with my concerns about them --Rikurzhen 20:07, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

Okay. I deleted the adverbs in the first two sentences and dropped the last two sentences entirely. Also, based on your comment on the other article's discussion page, I clarified the differences between physical anthropology sources and medical sources in the paragraph on the decline of the paradigm over the past century. -- Frank W Sweet 20:55, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
If you are satisfied now, I will leave it to you to tweak it further, as needed "for some balancing of wording and emphasis." -- Frank W Sweet 20:55, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Risch

Now about Risch. What, exactly would you say is the thesis of that article? Seriously, in one sentence or two. I have my own idea, but I also want to hear yours. If I understand its thesis correctly, it is irrelevant to this Wikipedia article. -- Frank W Sweet 20:55, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

The thesis of Risch (2002) is that self-identified race AND ethnicity (SIRE) is indispensable to biomedical research. The main justifications for this claim are (background) as later demonstrated more robustly by this same group in Tang et al (2005) SIRE is highly concordant with clusters derived from the analysis of polymorphic loci throughout the genome, but (1) substituting SIRE with race blind sampling from the population will under sample minority populations where it is preferable to oversample them and (2) substituting SIRE with genetically inferred ancestry will miss ethnicity information, which can tell you about environmental covariates of race and/or sub-divisions (sub populations) within groups of the same ancestry. --Rikurzhen 21:21, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

Great! We both read the same thing. Or, as the authors put it succinctly in the last sentence of their abstract, "We provide an epidemiologic perspective... that strongly supports the continued use of self-identified race and ethnicity." The article is a polemic in favor of continuing to classify people by self-identified race and ethnicity. It argues against discontinuing classification by self-identified race and ethnicity. Personally, I have never read anyone who claimed that it should be discontinued (although I have read a few Latin American researchers who found it unsuitable to their studies), but that is neither here nor there.
My point is that our article takes no stand on how to categorize people. It merely describes the three main ways that researchers in fact do categorize people. Furthermore, self-identified race and ethnicity is the first scheme that we describe, and the one that we describe in most depth. I cannot see any way to introduce a polemical argument that "supports the continued use of" a classification method when nowhere do we suggest than anyone advocates its discontinuance. I have no problem including Risch et al. in the "Other References," if you wish. But for the life of me I cannot see how to make use of an argument that the first method we describe "should be continued." -- Frank W Sweet 21:50, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

Risch et al set up their paper as a response to opinions such as these: [excerpted from Risch et al 2002]

  • A recent editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine [1] claimed that "race is biologically meaningless" and warned that "instruction in medical genetics should emphasize the fallacy of race as a scientific concept and the dangers inherent in practicing race-based medicine."
  • A recent article in Nature Genetics [2] purported to find that "commonly used ethnic labels are both insufficient and inaccurate representations of inferred genetic clusters."
  • A supporting editorial in the same issue [3] concluded that "population clusters identified by genotype analysis seem to be more informative than those identified by skin color or self-declaration of 'race'."
  • These conclusions seem consistent with the claim that "there is no biological basis for 'race'" [3] and that "the myth of major genetic differences across 'races' is nonetheless worth dismissing with genetic evidence" [4].

1. Schwartz RS: Racial profiling in medical research. N Engl J Med 2001, 344:1392-1393. 2. Wilson JF, Weale ME, Smith AC, Gratrix F, Fletcher B, Thomas MF, Bradman N, Goldstein DB: Population genetic structure of variable drug response. Nat Genet 2001, 29:265-269. 3. Editorial: Genes, drugs and race. Nat Genet 2001, 29:239-240. 4. Owens K, King M-C: Genomic views of human history. Science 1999, 286:451-453.

Of course, [2] is quoted in the section titled The controversy jeopardizes the credibility of otherwise useful studies. --Rikurzhen 22:34, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

You wrote: "Risch et al set up their paper as a response to opinions such as these:..." So what? Why should we care? What difference does it make to this article? -- Frank W Sweet 23:19, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
Sure we quote Wilson et al. But the Wilson article was correlating drug response to a people's genomes and found self-identifed group membership to be useless for this specific purpose! Surely, neither Wilson et al. nor Risch et al., nor anybody is saying that everyone should use the same classification scheme regardless of intent! And if someone is saying this, why should we care? -- Frank W Sweet 23:19, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
The Wilson quotation is meant to show opposition to "vague or ambiguous terminology," not to suggest that any one classification scheme should serve every purpose. If you think that the Wilson quotation confuses things or seems to take sides in a dispute, then by all means let's drop it. -- Frank W Sweet 23:19, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
The quotations you cite give the impression that you want the article to present a debate over which methodology is best for every conceivable research purpose. I see no point in point in doing this. It would bloat the article to no end. All we should do is describe the different approaches that researchers take to classfying people. -- Frank W Sweet 23:19, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
Again, our article is not advocating that anyone use a classification method that does not suit their goals. And we are certainly not advocating that any scheme should be discontinued. Hell, we are not advocating anything at all. We are merely pointing out (with credible sources) that studies which do not make clear how they classified people (or in one example, even conceal their methodology) are needlessly confusing. -- Frank W Sweet 22:59, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
Finally, the quotations you cite again give the distinct impression that you want the article to present the sterile semantic debate over the word "race." You know how I feel about this. I would rather be poked in the eye with a sharp stick. Sure, we can spend several thousand words saying, when you come down to it, nothing more than: "some guys like the word and other guys don't, but they cannot agree on what it means." The Race article already does this with excruciating thoroughness. Please. That is not our purpose here. -- Frank W Sweet 23:19, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
Mmm... re-read Risch 2002, particular the section titled Genetic clustering versus self-reported ancestry which begins A major conclusion from the study of Wilson et al. [2], reiterated in accompanying editorials, is that "Clusters identified by genotyping... are far more robust than those identified using geographic and ethnic labels" [26]. But closer examination of the study and other data actually leads to the opposite conclusion: namely, that self-defined race, ethnicity or ancestry are actually more genetically informative than clusters based on analysis of random genetic markers. --Rikurzhen

So what? Who cares whether someone thinks that questionnaire is better than DNA (or vice-versa)? Why should I concern myself with this? Our job is to report both approaches because researchers actually use both approaches. Every researcher MUST use whichever approach works best for him/her-- Frank W Sweet 03:43, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

Also, there may be some confusion about the list of quotations I gave above. Notice my note excerpted from Risch et al 2002. These are the quotations that Risch et al give in the introduction of their paper. That is, I did not compile them myself with a specific aim other than the point out the dimension of this topic address by Risch et al (2002). --Rikurzhen 00:23, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

I understood this. You already made it clear. I also understand that a debate over questionnaire versus DNA is important to you. But it is of no interest to me. Please stop trying to convince me that questionnaire is better than DNA (or is it vice-versa?). I do not care. I - do - not - care. And I suggest that it is of no interest to readers who merely want to know that both methods are used by researchers. Every researcher MUST use whichever approach works best for him/her-- Frank W Sweet 03:43, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

You are no longer talking about WP:NPOV nor WP:NOR nor WP:V. You now are talking about expanding this article's scope beyond merely explaining the different classification methods. You want to write a debate whether questionnaire is better than DNA, knowing full well that every researcher MUST use whichever approach works best for him/her. Okay. Write it. But write it without me. I am not interested. -- Frank W Sweet 03:43, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Definition of 'Race'

Allow me to step in here a moment and ask a question. How is 'race' defined?

I shall admit here that I haven't read the race article in Wikipedia yet, and I may find an answer there. However, in my capacity as an amateur entomologist, I dicussed with a professional in the field what is meant scientifically by 'race' and his answer was direct and unequivocal. He stated that a 'race' is simply a geographical population variant within a species that possesses a set of genes common to that population, which are not found outside that population. As an example I was pointed in the direction of Papilio dardanus (Brown, 1776), an African Swallowtail butterfly that exhibits population variance of this kind (see this article for more information). This butterfly is characterised by males that are a uniform black and white colour, but females that posses mimetic patterns modelled upon toxin-sequestering species of butterflies from other families, presumably to acquire protection through Batesian mimicry. The point here is that different geographical populations of those butterflies have females that are mimetic with respect to different model species. The details of the mimetic pattern are, in fact, controlled by polygenes - and if one takes a male from population A, and mates that male with a female from population B, the mimetic pattern is destroyed in the resulting female offspring. Indeed, it was while analysing this very subject that Professor Sir Cyril Clarke (who was a leading light in my Entomology Society until his death) had a 'eureka moment', realised that polygenes provide the best model for the inheritance of the Rhesus factor in humans, which led him (along with co-worker Dr Ronald Finn) to devise the therapeutic procedures for neonatal Rhesus haemolytic disease, for which he was knighted, and for which he also received a Lasker Award. From a scientific viewpoint, this is not problematic, and neither is it problematic to analyse whether or not such genetic population variants exist among humans, and whether or not those differences contribute to different patterns of disease. I suspect part of the problem here is that 'race' has acquired unfortunate political connotations through human history, and while sensitivity to those is appropriate, the legacy of the past makes sensible progress in this area difficult. Therefore, can I issue a plea that [1] terms are properly defined, [2] the effect of using different definitions in different research projects is duly highlighted so that accurate assessments can be made, and [3] that an effort be made by all concerned to ensure that the focus of the article remains strictly that of medical science? Calilasseia 22:11, 20 May 2006 (UTC)


I think races could also be thought of as normative groups that mixed race people and especially multi racial individuals are outside. 87.194.35.230 18:47, 11 November 2006 (UTC)
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