Race has become a prominent focus for human biotechnology. Despite often good intentions, human genetics is being used in a manner that may provide new justification for thinking about racial differences in biological terms—as if social categories of race reflect natural group differences.
 
Research has shown that there is less than one percent genetic variation among all humans. Although certain populations carry genetic signatures in their DNA, scientists have found little evidence to support lay understandings that social understandings of racial categories reflect inherent biological differences. While research findings initially led many to conclude that race (as it is commonly conceived and used) is not genetically significant, the hope that science would promote racial healing has been not been fulfilled.
 
In fact, trends in life science research have shifted the other way. There are increasing efforts to demonstrate the genetic relevance of race by mapping this less than 1% of variation onto social categories of race to explain racial differences and disparities.
 
Many celebrate these developments as an opportunity to learn more about who we are and why certain groups are sicker than others. Yet some are struck by how these new conversations - aimed at benefiting minority communities - echo past discussions in which biology was used to justify racial hierarchies.
 
Although this new research is fraught with controversy, it is being used to develop several commercial and forensic applications that may give new credibility to inaccurate biological understandings of racial difference—often stated with more certainty than is supported by the available evidence. This rush can have significant implications for racial minorities:
 
■ DNA forensics have been used to exonerate those who have been wrongly convicted and can provide important tools for law enforcement. However, some genetic forensic applications might undermine civil rights—especially in minority communities.
 
■ Genetic ancestry tests rely on incomplete scientific methods that may lead to inaccurate claims. The companies that sell them often suggest that biotechnology can authoritatively tell us who we are and where we come from.
 
■ Race-based medicines have been promoted as a way to reduce inequities in health. Yet the assumptions and market incentives behind them raise many troubling issues.
 
While each of these applications has been examined individually, Playing the Gene Card? A Report on Race and Human Biotechnology looks at them together to highlight a key concern: that commercial and other pressures may distort or oversimplify the complex relationship among race, population, and genes. Applications based on these distortions or oversimplifications may give undue legitimacy to the idea that socially-understood categories of race reflect discrete biological differences.
 
The concerns raised should not be read as condemning all genetic research on race. There’s evidence that notions of race may loosely reflect patterns of genetic variation created by evolutionary forces, and that knowledge about them may ultimately serve important social or medical goals. But given our ugly history of linking biological understandings to notions of racial superiority - and inferiority – we shouldn’t ignore the possibility that 21st century technologies may be used to revive long discredited 19th century theories of race.
 
Advances in human biotechnology hold great promise. But if they are to benefit all of us, we must pay closer attention to their social risks and their particular impacts on minority communities.