Racial Alchemy

Of all the genetically determined traits that we might one day hope to control, skin colour is surely one of the most politically explosive. What might the consequences be for society if we could alter our skin colour at will? Would it prove the superficiality of race, bringing centuries of prejudice to an end? Or might it exacerbate such bias by creating a bitter divide between those who can afford to lighten their skin and those who cannot?

With the recent discovery of several gene variants that play a sizeable role in human skin pigmentation, we are getting close to finding out. Skin colour is determined by the amount and distribution of the pigment melanin in compartments within our skin cells called melanosomes. Mutations in the proteins involved in this process, such as tyrosinase (Molecular Biology and Evolution, DOI: 10.1093/molbev/msl203) and SLC24A5 (Science, vol 310, p 1782), result in significantly lighter skin. This week, the SOX9 protein was added to the list (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0705117104).

Disturbingly, this research is going ahead with...