Biogeographical ancestry and race
Section snippets
Introduction: categories of race and ethnicity in biological and biomedical research
Completion of the Human Genome Project (HGP), and the consequent shift of resources to investigating patterns of variability across genomes that are of possible biological and biomedical interest, have contributed to an increased use of categories of race and ethnicity to study group-based genetic and genomic differences.
‘Single-gene’ diseases that appear at different frequencies in different racial and ethnic groups are familiar to us: for example, in the United States, sickle-cell anaemia is
Inventing biogeographical ancestry
The term ‘biogeographical ancestry’ was introduced in 2000, in a poster presentation by Carrie Pfaff, Esteban Parra, and Mark Shriver at the meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics (at the time, Pfaff was a doctoral student and Parra was a postdoctoral researcher in Shriver's lab). The ASHG abstract notes that ‘Ethnicity is comprised of both biological and cultural components’ and defines ‘biogeographical ancestry’, abbreviated as ‘BGA’, as ‘the component of ethnicity that is
Biogeographical ancestry as a global category of biological and anthropological classification
In this section, I show how BGA's inventors and merchandisers re-enact ‘race’ as it has been traditionally conceived and constructed as a global category of biological and anthropological classification within the European scientific and philosophical traditions, what philosophers often call a natural kind (Gannett, 2010). Traditional conceptions and constructions of race associated with 18th-century natural history, 19th-century racial biology, and early 20th-century physical anthropology tend
BGA as race made in the U.S.A.
BGA fails as a global category of biological and anthropological classification. As Fullwiley (2008) points out, the paucity of groups sampled in order to identify and validate AIMs for ‘ancestral populations’ has resulted in a ‘drastically simplified’ representation of human genome diversity across space and time:
The complexity of how both ‘geography’ and ‘time’ have born out human variation has been drastically simplified…. While the girth of the globe has been flattened to a small area of
Conclusion: hold the hoorays for BGA
Today, DNAPrint genomics, Inc. is defunct. The company never did make money. By mid-2007, after losing $8.7 million in 2005 and $12.3 million in 2006, DNAPrint was trading for less than a penny a share and forced to issue shares in its subsidiary DNAPrint Pharmaceuticals as payment of $6 million to Dutchess Private Equities Fund Ltd. In January 2008, Nanobac Pharmaceuticals signed a letter of intent to acquire DNAPrint, but the deal did not go through, and in May 2008, the company moved from a
Acknowledgements
I presented material from this paper at a number of conferences, workshops, and colloquia over several years, and I am indebted to all of the organizers, participants, and audience members involved. I am especially grateful to Jenny Bangham and Soraya de Chadarevian for their helpful editorial input and for inviting me to be part of this important project on post-WWII human heredity, which brought together such a wonderful group of scholars.
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