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Revisiting Race
in a Genomic Age

Over the past two years the Research Workshop, "Revisiting Race and Ethnicity in the Context of Emerging Genetic Research," co-sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center and the Center for the Comparative Study of Race & Ethnicity (CCSRE), brought together scholars from the sciences, social sciences and the humanities to reflect on several critical questions: How should we think about (and talk about) the correspondence of human population genetic structure with traditional racial and ethnic categories? And what is the importance of such distinctions in scholarship across a range of disciplines, and for public policy?

The workshop hosted many of the leading scholars working at the intersection of "race" and genetic technologies to address a broad range of related social, ethical, and technical issues. The core participants in the "Revisiting Race and Ethnicity in the Context of Emerging Genetic Research" workshop have now come together to form one of the Humanities Center's new Research Network Projects. Using the newly developed Humanities Research Network, medical anthropologists Sandra Lee at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics and Barbara Koenig, who has recently moved to the Mayo School of Medicine in Minnesota, will continue their collaboration at a distance via remote conferencing and content management technology.

The activities of the Research Network Group will culminate in a collection of papers "Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age," to be edited by Drs. Koenig and Lee and Sarah Richardson. The group will work together in person at an authors' conference on January 9-10, 2006, which will be held at the Stanford Humanities Center. Here speakers who had presented papers at the workshop will reconvene to discuss individual papers that will be included in the book. The authors will also collaborate through the Humanities Research Network towards the book's publication. The book will make a unique contribution across multiple fields: in public policy, bioethics, history, anthropology, and genetics. It will be of particular use in courses examining the intersection of race and genetics, and to scholars and policy makers seeking a sophisticated and comprehensive introduction to the issues.

In addition to the authors' conference, a public panel discussion entitled "Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age: A Public Forum on Race Based Drug Design" on Tuesday, January 10, from 4-6pm will address the use of race in the creation of genomic-based therapeutics and its implications for broader understandings of difference among populations. This panel discussion is co-sponsored by the Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, the Stanford Humanities Center, the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, the Center for Law and the Biosciences, the Program in Ethics in Society, and the Center on Ethics.

To download the forum poster, click here.

To download the Revisiting Race public forum video, here.

Back ground papers include:
Racializing Drug Design: Implications of Pharmacogenomics for Health Disparity by Sandra Soo-Jin Lee

Getting the Numbers Right: Statistical Mischief and Racial Profiling in Heart Failure Research by Jonathan Kahn

BiDil: Race Medicine or Race Marketing? by Pamela Sankar and Jonathan Kahn