Finally, genomics has brought new clarity to our understanding of racial groupings, but has also intensified persistent uncertainties about the use of race as a category in research and clinical care.14 One ELSI Congress panel highlighted several facets of race as a contested category in biomedicine [A-8]. While self-reported race may be a useful point of entry for clinicians seeking genetically targeted interventions for their patients, the social category “race” does not necessarily capture the genomic complexity of populations and ancestry groups. In fact, as one paper argued, there is a well-documented tendency to turn to racial categories as proxies for population risk in the context of clinical uncertainty [A-8, Cunningham].15 Current patenting regulations tend to reify “race” as a genetic category in the development, testing, and marketing of new pharmaceuticals, a trend that has serious implications for the design of clinical trials and the marketing of new drugs [A-8, Kahn]. This conflation of race with genetic ancestry is exacerbated by NIH policies on the inclusion of underrepresented minorities in research, since these minority groups are defined by self-reported race and ethnicity, rather than genetically defined ancestry groups [B-6].
