Why Racial Profiling Persists in Medical Research
By Catherine Elton,
Time
| 08. 22. 2009
While the rest of the country wrangled over the behavior of police
officers in the wake of the Henry Louis Gates arrest last month, some
scientists were pulling out their hair over racial profiling of a
different kind: that perpetrated by medical researchers. Experts within
the research community say a small but stubborn streak of racial
profiling has long persisted in the medical literature, borne out in
studies that attribute health disparities between blacks and whites not
to socioeconomics or access to health care alone but also to genetic
differences between the races — a concept that implies that a
biological category of race exists.
The controversy resurfaced in July with the publication of a study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (JNCI)
in which researchers analyzed more than 19,000 patients who
participated in clinical trials involving treatments for a variety of
cancers. The paper found that all other factors being equal, black
patients had on average a significantly lower cancer survival rate than
whites. Given that all patients were participating in the same clinical
trials, the authors...
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