[tt] NYT: In DNA Era, New Worries About Prejudice

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In DNA Era, New Worries About Prejudice
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/us/11dna.html

The DNA Age
By AMY HARMON

When scientists first decoded the human genome in 2000, they were
quick to portray it as proof of humankinds remarkable similarity.
The DNA of any two people, they emphasized, is at least 99 percent
identical.

But new research is exploring the remaining fraction to explain
differences between people of different continental origins.

Scientists, for instance, have recently identified small changes in
DNA that account for the pale skin of Europeans, the tendency of
Asians to sweat less and West Africans resistance to certain
diseases.

At the same time, genetic information is slipping out of the
laboratory and into everyday life, carrying with it the inescapable
message that people of different races have different DNA. Ancestry
tests tell customers what percentage of their genes are from Asia,
Europe, Africa and the Americas. The heart-disease drug BiDil is
marketed exclusively to African-Americans, who seem genetically
predisposed to respond to it. Jews are offered prenatal tests for
genetic disorders rarely found in other ethnic groups.

Such developments are providing some of the first tangible benefits
of the genetic revolution. Yet some social critics fear they may
also be giving long-discredited racial prejudices a new potency.
The notion that race is more than skin deep, they fear, could
undermine principles of equal treatment and opportunity that have
relied on the presumption that we are all fundamentally equal.

We are living through an era of the ascendance of biology, and we
have to be very careful, said Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of
the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American
Research at Harvard University. We will all be walking a fine line
between using biology and allowing it to be abused.

Certain superficial traits like skin pigmentation have long been
presumed to be genetic. But the ability to pinpoint their DNA
source makes the link between genes and race more palpable. And on
mainstream blogs, in college classrooms and among the growing
community of ancestry test-takers, it is prompting the question of
whether more profound differences may also be attributed to DNA.

Nonscientists are already beginning to stitch together highly
speculative conclusions about the historically charged subject of
race and intelligence from the new biological data. Last month, a
blogger in Manhattan described a recently published study that
linked several snippets of DNA to high I.Q. An online genetic
database used by medical researchers, he told readers, showed that
two of the snippets were found more often in Europeans and Asians
than in Africans.

No matter that the link between I.Q. and those particular bits of
DNA was unconfirmed, or that other high I.Q. snippets are more
common in Africans, or that hundreds or thousands of others may
also affect intelligence, or that their combined influence might be
dwarfed by environmental factors. Just the existence of such
genetic differences between races, proclaimed the author of the
Half Sigma blog, a 40-year-old software developer, means the
egalitarian theory, that all races are equal, is proven false.

Though few of the bits of human genetic code that vary between
individuals have yet to be tied to physical or behavioral traits,
scientists have found that roughly 10 percent of them are more
common in certain continental groups and can be used to distinguish
people of different races. They say that studying the differences,
which arose during the tens of thousands of years that human
populations evolved on separate continents after their ancestors
dispersed from humanitys birthplace in East Africa, is crucial to
mapping the genetic basis for disease.

But many geneticists, wary of fueling discrimination and worried
that speaking openly about race could endanger support for their
research, are loath to discuss the social implications of their
findings. Still, some acknowledge that as their data and methods
are extended to nonmedical traits, the field is at what one leading
researcher recently called a very delicate time, and a dangerous
time.

There are clear differences between people of different continental
ancestries, said Marcus W. Feldman, a professor of biological
sciences at Stanford University. Its not there yet for things like
I.Q., but I can see it coming. And it has the potential to spark a
new era of racism if we do not start explaining it better.

Dr. Feldman said any finding on intelligence was likely to be
exceedingly hard to pin down. But given that some may emerge, he
said he wanted to create ready response teams of geneticists to put
such socially fraught discoveries in perspective.

The authority that DNA has earned through its use in freeing
falsely convicted inmates, preventing disease and reconstructing
family ties leads people to wrongly elevate genetics over other
explanations for differences between groups.

Ive spent the last 10 years of my life researching how much genetic
variability there is between populations, said Dr. David Altshuler,
director of the Program in Medical and Population Genetics at the
Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass. But living in America, it is so
clear that the economic and social and educational differences have
so much more influence than genes. People just somehow fixate on
genetics, even if the influence is very small.

But on the Half Sigma blog and elsewhere, the conversation is
already flashing forward to what might happen if genetically
encoded racial differences in socially desirable or undesirable
traits are identified.

If I were to believe the facts in this post, what should I do? one
reader responded on Half Sigma. Should I advocate discrimination
against blacks because they are less smart? Should I not hire them
to my company because odds are I could find a smarter white person?
Stop trying to prove that one group of people are genetically
inferior to your group. Just stop.

Renata McGriff, 52, a health care consultant who had been
encouraging black clients to volunteer genetic information to
scientists, said she and other African-Americans have lately been
discussing opting out of genetic research until its clear were not
going to use science to validate prejudices.

I dont want the children in my family to be born thinking they are
less than someone else based on their DNA, added Ms. McGriff, of
Manhattan.

Such discussions are among thousands that followed the geneticist
James D. Watsons assertion last month that Africans are innately
less intelligent than other races. Dr. Watson, a Nobel Prize
winner, subsequently apologized and quit his post at the Cold
Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island.

But the incident has added to uneasiness about whether society is
prepared to handle the consequences of science that may eventually
reveal appreciable differences between races in the genes that
influence socially important traits.

New genetic information, some liberal critics say, could become the
latest rallying point for a conservative political camp that
objects to social policies like affirmative action, as happened
with The Bell Curve, the controversial 1994 book that examined the
relationship between race and I.Q.

Yet even some self-described liberals argue that accepting that
there may be genetic differences between races is important in
preparing to address them politically.

Lets say the genetic data says well have to spend two times as much
for every black child to close the achievement gap, said Jason
Malloy, 28, an artist in Madison, Wis., who wrote a defense of Dr.
Watson for the widely read science blog Gene Expression. Society,
he said, would need to consider how individuals can be given
educational and occupational opportunities that work best for their
unique talents and limitations.

Others hope that the genetic data may overturn preconceived notions
of racial superiority by, for example, showing that Africans are
innately more intelligent than other groups. But either way, the
increased outpouring of conversation on the normally taboo subject
of race and genetics has prompted some to suggest that innate
differences should be accepted but, at some level, ignored.

Regardless of any such genetic variation, it is our moral duty to
treat all as equal before God and before the law, Perry Clark, 44,
wrote on a New York Times blog. It is not necessary, argued Dr.
Clark, a retired neonatologist in Leawood, Kan., who is white, to
maintain the pretense that inborn racial differences do not exist.

When was the last time a nonblack sprinter won the Olympic 100
meters? he asked.

To say that such differences arent real, Dr. Clark later said in an
interview, is to stick your head in the sand and go blah blah blah
blah blah until the band marches by.

Race, many sociologists and anthropologists have argued for
decades, is a social invention historically used to justify
prejudice and persecution. But when Samuel M. Richards gave his
students at Pennsylvania State University genetic ancestry tests to
establish the imprecision of socially constructed racial
categories, he found the exercise reinforced them instead.

One white-skinned student, told she was 9 percent West African,
went to a Kwanzaa celebration, for instance, but would not dream of
going to an Asian cultural event because her DNA did not match, Dr.
Richards said. Preconceived notions of race seemed all the more
authentic when quantified by DNA.

Before, it was, Im white because I have white skin and grew up in
white culture, Dr. Richards said. Now its, I really know Im white,
so white is this big neon sign hanging over my head. Its like, oh,
no, come on. That wasnt the point.