Politico October 31, 2024
CONNECTING THE DOTS
Researchers studying human health and disease should scrutinize whether taking race and ethnicity into account is appropriate at every stage of their work, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine said in a report released Wednesday.
Why it matters: The idea of dividing people into biologically separate groups, known as race science, isn’t scientific, the academies said. There’s no genetic or biological basis for race, so using it in biomedical research to explain biology or genetic differences is inappropriate, it added.
Genetic variants that put certain people more at risk for a disease — such as the high propensity of sickle cell disease among Black people — are due to geographic distribution or ancestry rather than...
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