Stevens Jacqueline
Law and Society Program, University of California at Santa Barbara, USA.
J Health Polit Policy Law. 2003 Dec;28(6):1033-87. doi: 10.1215/03616878-28-6-1033.
Conventional wisdom holds that race is socially constructed and not based on genetic differences. Cutting-edge genetic research threatens this view and hence also endangers the pursuit of racial equality and useful public health research. The most recent incarnation of racial genetics is not due to scientific discoveries about population differences per se, but follows from how the United States and other governments have organized racial categories. This article explains tensions in U.S. government guidelines and publications on the study of human genetic diversity, points out the absence of any compelling public health benefits that might justify this research, introduces conceptual tools for addressing the complicated heuristic and policy problems posed by medical population genetics, and offers two policy proposals to remedy the current problems.
传统观点认为，种族是社会建构的，并非基于基因差异。前沿的基因研究对这一观点构成了威胁，因此也危及到对种族平等的追求以及有益的公共卫生研究。种族遗传学的最新表现形式并非源于关于人群差异本身的科学发现，而是源于美国和其他国家政府对种族类别的划分方式。本文解释了美国政府关于人类基因多样性研究的指导方针和出版物中存在的矛盾，指出该研究缺乏任何能证明其合理性的显著公共卫生益处，介绍了用于解决医学群体遗传学所带来的复杂启发式和政策问题的概念工具，并提出了两项政策建议以解决当前问题。
