We have all heard the statistics indicating that African-Americans have a higher rate of heart disease compared with the rest of the population; data collected from 2001 to 2004 for the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey claims that twice as many African-Americans between the ages 45 and 64 develop heart failure compared to other Americans in this age group. This past June, the FDA approved the antihypertensive drug BiDil for the treatment of heart failure in self-identified African-American patients, setting a new precedent for racial labeling of drugs. The multidisciplinary panel will discuss this decision of using race as a proxy for genetic relatedness in drug design and the broader implications on current understanding of difference among groups. They will explore questions such as how should we think about the correspondence of human population genetic structure with traditional racial and ethnic categories? What are the implications of these decisions on health disparities among racially identified populations? And how does current research on genetic differences engage with the creation of social identities and race?
Lawrence D. Bobo, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor and Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, will provide the opening remarks for a discussion with panelists approaching the issue from a variety of perspectives: Sally Haslanger (Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Marcus Feldman (Biological Sciences, Stanford University), Jonathan Kahn (School of Law, Hamline University), Duana Fullwiley (Department of Society, Human Development, and Health, Harvard University), and Rick Kittles (Department of Molecular Virology, Immunology and Medical Genetics, Ohio State University). The panel moderator is Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, a Medical Anthropologist and Senior Research Scholar at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics who does research on genomic technologies and conceptions of "race," identity, and justice in biomedicine.
“Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age: A Public Forum on Race-based Drug Design” is on Tuesday, January 10, 2006 from 4 to 6pm with a reception to follow. This free public event, held at Levinthal Hall in the Stanford Humanities Center, is presented by the Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and co-sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, Center for Biomedical Ethics, Center for Law and the Biosciences, Program in Ethics in Society and the Center on Ethics.