[Paleopsych] Kenan Malik: Is this the future we really want? Different drugs for different races

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Kenan Malik: Is this the future we really want? Different drugs for different 
races
The Times Online guest contributors Opinion
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1072-1658766,00.html
5.6.18

     A US GOVERNMENT advisory panel recommended this week that a drug which
     helps to treat congestive heart failure should be granted a licence.
     Its decision is controversial because BiDiL will be the first
     racially-targeted drug. When tested on the general population it
     proved ineffective, but when given to African-Americans, to whom it
     will be marketed, it appeared to cut death rates from heart failure by
     43 per cent.

     The BiDiL debate gets to the heart of one of the most explosive issues
     in medicine. Does race matter in medicine? Or should it be
     colour-blind?

     The New England Journal of Medicine has argued that "race is
     biologically meaningless" and that doctors should be taught about "the
     dangers inherent in practising race-based medicine." Others disagree.
     The psychiatrist, Sally Satel, believes that in medicine "stereotyping
     often works". In her Washington drug clinic, Satel prescribes
     different amounts of Prozac to black and white patients because, she
     says, the two groups seem to meta bolise antidepressants at different
     rates.

     So who is right? As with much else in debates about race, the answer
     is both sides and neither. Different populations do show different
     patterns of disease and disorder. Northern Europeans, for instance,
     are more likely to suffer from cystic fibrosis than other groups.
     Tay-Sachs, a fatal disease of the central nervous system, particularly
     affects Ashkenazi Jews. Beta-blockers appear to work less effectively
     for African-Americans than those of European descent.

     Yet race is not necessarily a good guide to disease. We all think we
     know that sickle-cell anaemia is a black disease. Except that it is
     not. Sickle cell is a disease of populations originating from areas
     with a high incidence of malaria. Some of these populations are black,
     some are not. The sickle-cell gene is found in equatorial Africa,
     parts of southern Europe, southern Turkey, parts of the Middle East
     and much of central India. Most people, however, only know that
     African-Americans suffer disproportionately from the trait. And, given
     popular ideas about race, they automatically assume that what applies
     to black Americans also applies to all blacks and only to blacks. It
     is the social imagination, not the biological reality, of race that
     turns sickle cell into a black disease.

     Genetic studies show that human beings comprise a relatively
     homogenous species and that most of our genetic variation is at
     individual, not group, level. Imagine that a nuclear explosion wiped
     out the human race apart from one small population -- say, the Masai
     tribe in East Africa. Virtually all the genetic variation that exists
     in the world today would still be present in that one small group.
     About 85 per cent of human variation occurs between individuals within
     local populations. A further 10 per cent or so differentiates
     populations within a race. Only about 5 per cent of total variation
     distinguishes the major races. This is why many scientists reject the
     idea of race.

     Since most variation exists at the individual level, doctors ideally
     would like to map every individual's genome to be able to predict
     better his potential medical problems and responses to different
     drugs. Such individual genotyping is currently both impracticable and
     too costly, so doctors often resort to using surrogate indicators of
     an individual's risk profile -- such as race.

     Until recently people were more likely to marry a neighbour than
     someone who hailed from distant lands. As a result the farther apart
     two populations are geographically, the more distinct they are likely
     to be genetically. Icelanders are genetically different from Greeks,
     but they are genetically closer to Greeks than they are to Nigerians.
     The difference is tiny, but it can have a medical impact. Knowing the
     population from which your ancestors came can provide hints as to what
     genes you may be carrying. Hence race, which Satel suggests, is a
     "poor man's clue" in medicine.

     But a poor man's clue may be about as reliable as an intelligence
     dossier. First, there are no hard and fast divisions between
     populations. Every population runs into another and no gene is unique
     to one. Cystic fibrosis may be more common among northern Europeans
     but is not confined to them. One of the dangers of marketing BiDiL as
     a black drug is that it may be given to African-Americans who don't
     respond to it, but denied to non-blacks who could. Secondly, different
     genes are distributed differently among populations. The pattern of
     distribution of genes for cystic fibrosis is not the same as that of
     sickle-cell genes. Which population differences are important varies
     from one disease to another. Finally, many medical differences
     associated with race are likely to be the result of environmental
     rather than genetic differences, or a combination of the two. In the
     case of response to BiDiL, no one knows which is more important.

     All this suggests that the question of whether medicine should be
     colourblind depends on the particular problem we want to address. It
     is a pragmatic issue, not one rooted in scientific or political
     principle. Race, however, is such a contentious issue that pragmatism
     rarely enters the debate. On one side, so-called race realists think
     that population differences are so important that all medicine should
     be colour-coded. On the other, many antiracists want to ban race-based
     research entirely for fear of its social consequences. Both are wrong.
     It is time everyone calmed down and took a grown-up view of the issue.

     Kenan Malik is author of Man, Beast and Zombie: What Science Can and
     Cannot Tell Us about Human Nature