Racial Categories in Medical Practice: How Useful Are They?

Is it good medical practice for physicians to "eyeball" a patient's race when assessing their medical status or even to ask them to identify their race

Getting Genetic Ancestry Right for Science and Society

There is a scientific and ethical imperative to embrace a multidimensional, continuous view of ancestry and move away from continental ancestry categorie

Racial categories in medicine: a failure of evidence-based practice?

Race and ethnicity are imprecise markers of the genotypic and sociocultural determinants of health, argue the authors

Problems with Using Polygenic Scores to Select Embryos

Companies have recently begun to sell a new service to patients considering in vitro fertilization: embryo selection based on polygenic scores (ESPS). These scores represent individualized predictions of health and other outcomes derived from genomewide association studies in adults to partially predict these outcomes. This article includes a discussion of many factors that lower the predictive power of polygenic scores in the context of embryo selection and quantifies these effects for a variety of clinical and nonclinical traits. Also discussed are potential unintended consequences of ESPS (including selecting for adverse traits, altering population demographics, exacerbating inequalities in society, and devaluing certain traits). Recommendations for the responsible communication about ESPS by practitioners are provided, and a call for a society-wide conversation about this technology is made. (Funded by the National Institute on Aging and others.)