Humane genomics education can reduce racism
By Brian M. Donovan, Monica Weindling, Jamie Amemiya, Brae Salazar, Dennis Lee, Awais Syed, Molly Stuhlsatz, and Jeffrey Snowden,
Science
| 02. 22. 2024
For as long as the concept of race has existed, racial prejudice has been justified on hereditary grounds (1, 2). Justifications of prejudice often misappropriate the work of Mendel, who first expounded a scientific model of inheritance by breeding peas (3). Today, our understanding of inheritance has moved far beyond Mendel, and insights from genomics refute the prejudiced idea that racial inequality is determined by genes (1). Even so, many believe that inequality is genetic because they are biased by an inaccurate conception of race called “genetic essentialism” (1, 2, 4). We present data from a randomized trial to argue that if teachers move genetics instruction beyond Mendel and toward more complex genomics concepts—what we call “humane genomics education”—they can protect students from believing in unscientific notions of genetic essentialism and support their scientifically accurate understanding of race as a social construction.
Genetic essentialism is a form of psychological essentialism, which is an early-developing bias in humans (4). Psychological essentialism is observable across human cultures and refers...
Related Articles
By Hannah Devlin, The Guardian | 05.14.2024
Photo by Kind and Curious from Unsplash
When Great Ormond Street hospital (Gosh) published the results of its gene therapy trial for “bubble baby” syndrome it was hailed as a medical breakthrough. The treatment had a more than 95% success...
By Victoria Bisset and Adela Suliman, The Washington Post | 05.09.2024
Photo by CDC from Unsplash
A baby girl born with profound genetic deafness can now hear unaided after receiving a “groundbreaking” gene therapy trial, Britain’s National Health Service said Thursday.
Opal Sandy, an 18-month-old from Oxfordshire, England, is the first...
By Carrie Arnold, Nature Biotechnology | 04.17.2024
Tome Biosciences came out of stealth mode on 12 December with a haul of over $200 million to develop the company’s gene editing platform. Tome’s first order of business was to snap up Replace Therapeutics to expand its toolkit to...
By Charlotte Hu, Vox | 05.06.2024
Medicine has entered a new era in which scientists have the tools to change human genetics directly, creating the potential to treat or even permanently cure diseases by editing a few strands of troublesome DNA. And CRISPR, the gene-editing...