Response to "The Legitimacy of Genetic Ancestry Tests"

Anthropolog

Do Health and Forensic DNA Databases Increase Racial Disparities?

Peter Chow-White and Troy Duster examine the question of whether the "digital divide" in health and forensic DNA databases is contributing to racial disparities

The case for strategic international alliances to harness nutritional genomics for public and personal health

Nutrigenomics is the study of how constituents of the diet interact with genes, and their products, to alter phenotype and, conversely, how genes and their products metabolise these constituents into nutrients, antinutrients, and bioactive compounds. Results from molecular and genetic epidemiological studies indicate that dietary unbalance can alter gene-nutrient interactions in ways that increase the risk of developing chronic disease. The interplay of human genetic variation and environmental factors will make identifying causative genes and nutrients a formidable, but not intractable, challenge. We provide specific recommendations for how to best meet this challenge and discuss the need for new methodologies and the use of comprehensive analyses of nutrient-genotype interactions involving large and diverse populations. The objective of the present paper is to stimulate discourse and collaboration among nutrigenomic researchers and stakeholders, a process that will lead to an increase in global health and wellness by reducing health disparities in developed and developing countrie

Social Diversity in Humans: Implications and Hidden Consequences for Biological Research

Humans are both similar and diverse in such a vast number of dimensions that for human geneticists and social scientists to decide which of these dimensions is a worthy focus of empirical investigation is a formidable challenge. For geneticists, one vital question, of course, revolves around hypothesizing which kind of social diversity might illuminate genetic variation-and vice versa (i.e., what genetic variation illuminates human social diversity). For example, are there health outcomes that can be best explained by genetic variation-or for social scientists, are health outcomes mainly a function of the social diversity of lifestyles and social circumstances of a given population? Indeed, what is a "population," how is it bounded, and are those boundaries most appropriate or relevant for human genetic research, be they national borders, religious affiliation, ethnic or racial identification, or language group, to name but a few? For social scientists, the matter of what constitutes the relevant borders of a population is equally complex, and the answer is demarcated by the goal of the research project. Although race and caste are categories deployed in both human genetics and social science, the social meaning of race and caste as pathways to employment, health, or education demonstrably overwhelms the analytic and explanatory power of genetic markers of difference between human aggregates