Deeply entrenched ideas die very slowly. A 2005 national survey of U.S. physicians found that 81% of physicians believed that race should be used as a biological basis for determining diseases and 85% indicated that drugs targeted toward specific ethnic and racial groups may have therapeutic advantages.128 Not surprisingly, the research literature provides many examples of the misuse of genetics in an effort to understand racial disparities in health. We briefly highlight a few examples. A 2000 study in the journal Demography claimed to examine the contribution of genetic and environmental factors to racial differences in low birth weight.129 The authors used self-identified race as markers of both genetic and social factors. They argued that racial categories are genetic entities because “generations of ‘reproductive isolation’ have led to differences in gene frequency across racial groups.” However, their quantitative genetic approach used self-identified race as the only marker of genetics, and the authors indicated that their analysis assumed that “genetic and environmental factors do not correlate or interact.” There are detailed critiques of the limitations of this approach.130,131
