[MD] Intellect vs. society

[Platt Holden]

Hi All,

The following excerpt from an article in the NY Times strikes me as 
illustrating a conflict between intellectual and social level values. The 
complete article can be found at: 

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/us/11dna.html?ref=science

Regards, Platt

In DNA Era, New Worries About Prejudice
By AMY HARMON

When scientists first decoded the human genome in 2000, they were quick to 
portray it as proof of humankind's 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 humanity's 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. "It's 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.