Sociologists have also noted a recent trend on the part of some geneticists to use current racial categories to capture genetic differences between population groups (Frank 2008). These researchers argue that data from multiple loci on the human genome can provide fairly accurate characterization of individuals into continental ancestral groups that approximate our current racial categories (Risch et al. 2002). These data on “continental ancestry” have been used to suggest that there is enormous practical value in using race as a biological category. However, Serre and Pablo (2004) have shown that sampling biases play a key role in conclusions regarding the continental clustering of populations. Thus, although genetic markers can uniquely identify most individuals, variations in biological characteristics relevant for health risks are not inherently structured into meaningful “racial” categories such that identifying ancestry provides little direct information regarding whether an individual has a specific genetic characteristic (Cooper et al. 2003). Sociologist Reanne Frank (2008) has noted the worrying trend in health disparities research of keeping the logic of genetic racial differences intact but substituting the language of “ancestral background” for the language of “race.”
