Biogeographical ancestry and race

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2014.05.017Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Biogeographical ancestry (BGA) is not an objective, scientific replacement for race.

  • BGA fails as a global category of biological and anthropological classification.

  • BGA is the product of a U.S. research context shaped especially by DNA forensics.

Abstract

The use of racial and ethnic categories in biological and biomedical research is controversial—for example, in the comparison of disease risk in different groups or as a means of making use of or controlling for population structure in the mapping of genes to chromosomes. Biogeographical ancestry (BGA) has been recommended as a more accurate and appropriate category. BGA is a product of the collaboration between biological anthropologist Mark Shriver from Pennsylvania State University and molecular biologist Tony Frudakis from the now-defunct biotechnology start-up company DNAPrint genomics, Inc. Shriver and Frudakis portray BGA as a measure of the ‘biological’, ‘genetic’, ‘natural’, and ‘objective’ components of race and ethnicity, what philosophers of science would call a natural kind. This paper argues that BGA is not a natural kind that escapes social and political connotations of race and ethnicity, as Shriver and Frudakis and other proponents believe, but a construction that is built upon race—as race has been socially constructed in the European scientific and philosophical traditions. More specifically, BGA is not a global category of biological and anthropological classification but a local category shaped by the U.S. context of its production, especially the forensic aim of being able to predict the race or ethnicity of an unknown suspect based on DNA found at the crime scene. Therefore, caution needs to be exercised in the embrace of BGA as an alternative to the use of racial and ethnic categories in biological and biomedical research.

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.

References (45)

  • R. Daniel et al.

    SNPs associated with physical traits: A valuable tool for the inference of biogeographical ancestry

    Forensic Science International: Genetics Supplement Series

    (2008)
  • D. Herbstman et al.

    The association of ancestry informative markers with experimental pain sensitivity

    The Journal of Pain

    (2008)
  • C. Bonilla et al.

    Admixture in the Hispanics of the San Luis Valley, Colorado, and its implications for complex trait gene mapping

    Annals of Human Genetics

    (2004)
  • C. Bouakaze et al.

    Pigment phenotype and biogeographical ancestry from ancient skeletal remains: Inferences from multiplexed autosomal SNP analysis

    International Journal of Legal Medicine

    (2009)
  • S. Chen et al.

    SNP S1103Y in the cardiac sodium channel gene SCN5A is associated with cardiac arrhythmias and sudden death in a white family

    Journal of Medical Genetics

    (2002)
  • DNAPrint genomics. (2002a). Annual report: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Form 10-KSB [for 2001]. Retrieved...
  • DNAPrint genomics. (2002b). DNAPrint/Mark Shriver Consulting Contract. Retrieved from...
  • DNAPrint genomics

    DNAPrint's DNAWitness test provided break in the Louisiana Multi-Agency Homicide Task Force serial killer case (5 June) [press release]

    PR Newswire

    (2003)
  • DNAPrint genomics. (2004a). DNAPrint's DNAWitness Technology Tightens Net on UK Rapist (28 April) [press release]....
  • DNAPrint genomics. (2004b). DNAPrint upgrades DNAWitness™ 2.5 (22 July) [press release]. Retrieved from...
  • T. Dobzhansky

    The genetic nature of differences among men

  • T. Dobzhansky

    Genetics and the origin of species

    (1951)
  • FDA [Food and Drug Administration]. (1998). Investigational new drug applications and new drug applications. Retrieved...
  • FDA [Food and Drug Administration]. (2005). Guidance for industry: Collection of race and ethnicity data in clinical...
  • Frudakis, T. N. (2002). Compositions and methods for detecting polymorphisms associated with pigmentation. U.S. Patent...
  • T.N. Frudakis

    Molecular photofitting: Predicting ancestry and phenotype using DNA

    (2008)
  • Frudakis, T. N., & Shriver, M. D. (2003). Compositions and methods for inferring ancestry. U.S. Patent and Trademark...
  • T. Frudakis et al.

    A classifier for the SNP-based inference of ancestry

    Journal of Forensic Sciences

    (2003)
  • D. Fullwiley

    The biologistical construction of race: ‘Admixture’ technology and the new genetic medicine

    Social Studies of Science

    (2008)
  • L. Gannett

    Racism and human genome diversity research: The ethical limits of ‘population thinking’

    Philosophy of Science

    (2001)
  • L. Gannett

    Questions asked and unasked: How by worrying less about the ‘really real’ philosophers of science might better contribute to debates about genetics and race

    Synthese

    (2010)
  • H.L. Gates

    ‘We are all Africans’: Genealogical research and DNA testing can reveal your ethnic connection to Africa

    Ebony

    (Dec 2007)
  • Cited by (0)

    View full text