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For a few years, the biological notion of race seemed dead and gone.
It was one of the high points of President Bill Clinton’s speech in 2000 announcing the near completion of research to sequence the structure of human DNA: "One of the great truths to emerge from this triumphant expedition inside the human genome," he said that day in the East Room, "is that in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same."
Yet just a few years later, genome scientists began to see that, while humanity’s genome is deeply shared, it is possible to group some DNA segments by their continental origin—African, European, Asian, Native American. Such DNA biomarkers seemed useful in the hunt for the genetic basis of disease. It made little sense for scientists, typically acting out of concern for health disparities, not to take those differences into account to increase their studies’ statistical power.
This awareness that DNA can be so sorted has prompted a crisis in the social sciences, however, where it’s a truism that race is...
It was one of the high points of President Bill Clinton’s speech in 2000 announcing the near completion of research to sequence the structure of human DNA: "One of the great truths to emerge from this triumphant expedition inside the human genome," he said that day in the East Room, "is that in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same."
Yet just a few years later, genome scientists began to see that, while humanity’s genome is deeply shared, it is possible to group some DNA segments by their continental origin—African, European, Asian, Native American. Such DNA biomarkers seemed useful in the hunt for the genetic basis of disease. It made little sense for scientists, typically acting out of concern for health disparities, not to take those differences into account to increase their studies’ statistical power.
This awareness that DNA can be so sorted has prompted a crisis in the social sciences, however, where it’s a truism that race is...