Geneticists should rethink how they use race and ethnicity, panel urges

The once widely held notion that humans fall into discrete races has led to geneticists drawing erroneous conclusions about the role of genes in shaping health and traits, and in some cases, to harmful discrimination against some groups. An expert committee is now urging an overhaul of this practice. Most notably, the committee’s report calls for researchers to scrap the term “race” itself in most studies, use caution with other labels such as ethnicity and geography, and determine ancestry by quantifying how closely a group’s members are related to reference genomes drawn from certain populations. “We’re calling for researchers to be more specific about what they’re trying to do,” says Duke University geneticist Charmaine Royal, co-chair of the committee, which was convened by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) and released its report today. The imprecise use of certain descriptors has “been a big problem in the genomics community, and it’s going to be a big change” to adopt a more thoughtful approach, she adds. NASEM formed the panel at the request of the National Institutes of Health. The panel’s report finds that “race,” or the notion that populations fall into a few distinct, stable biological groups, is a social classification and not a scientifically valid way to measure genetic variation. All populations have mixed and moved over time; Europeans today have Middle Eastern ancestry, for...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research