“When the first complete draft of the human genome was completed in 2000, the geneticist Craig Venter asserted that it illustrated “that the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.” On its face, such declarations would seem to neatly and nicely make it clear that race had no genetic basis, surely laying the foundations for a definitive disentanglement of biological concepts of genetic diversity from social concepts of diversity. But this has not happened-not in the biological sciences, nor in the worlds of law and politics. This entanglement is the primary focus of this book. In particular, the book explores how, over the past half-century, the concept of “diversity” has been a distinctive site for producing understandings of race that have crossed lines between the worlds of the biological sciences and those of law, politics, and commerce. Crossing such lines does not always or of necessity produce knots, but it often does, and when it does so it has tended to reify race as genetic in highly problematic and often dangerous ways. This project examines this deep tension at the heart of modern genomics between the idea that science has now proven that there is only one race, the human race, versus an enduring concern with genetic variation that might correlate with racial and ethnic categories. This tension shapes how we conceptualize the nature of race, approach problems of health disparities, and formulate related regulatory directives. This book will explore this shift from its roots in the 1970s up to the present. It will consider the broader ethical, legal, and social implications of reintroducing race (now as a “subpopulation”) at the forefront of biomedical advancement. In the move from “personal” to “precision” medicine, race is being hardwired into massive databases as a basic category for structuring biomedical research and practice. Such practices run the risk of reinvigorating dangerous and inaccurate conceptions of race as biological in a manner that could both undermine attempts to address persistent race-based health disparities and fuel pernicious racist ideologies”–
