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Often we think research and medicine are above the fray, but in an election year, hot-button issues touch everything.
Public health researcher Michael Yudell and his colleagues argue that doctors and geneticists should stop relying on broad, sweeping race categories.
Yudell is chair of the department of community health and prevention in the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University.
Culturally, politically, legally, historically, race has deep meaning for many people. When we fill out a census form, we check Asian, white, black, Pacific Islander—and—or American Indian. Those divisions aren't in our genes, Yudell said, but they are deep in our social DNA.
There's no biological basis for the common ways we define race, he said.
"It's not as if all so-called white people have one set of genes, and so called black have another, and all Asians have another set of genes," Yudell said.
Genetic research is important, he said, medicine needs to understand how people are different at the genetic level.
"We are better off looking at individual genes and...