Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age
Jonathan Kahn
Abstract
At a ceremony announcing the completion of the first draft of the human genome in 2000, President Bill Clinton declared, “I believe one of the great truths to emerge from this triumphant expedition inside the human genome is that in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same.” Yet despite this declaration of unity, biomedical research has focused increasingly on mapping that 0.1 percent of difference, particularly as it relates to race. This trend is exemplified by the drug BiDil. This drug was originally touted as a groundbreaking therapy to treat ... More
At a ceremony announcing the completion of the first draft of the human genome in 2000, President Bill Clinton declared, “I believe one of the great truths to emerge from this triumphant expedition inside the human genome is that in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same.” Yet despite this declaration of unity, biomedical research has focused increasingly on mapping that 0.1 percent of difference, particularly as it relates to race. This trend is exemplified by the drug BiDil. This drug was originally touted as a groundbreaking therapy to treat heart failure in black patients and help underserved populations. However, the book reveals a far more complex story. At the most basic level, BiDil became racial through legal maneuvering and commercial pressure as much as through medical understandings of how the drug worked. The book broadly examines the legal and commercial imperatives driving the expanding role of race in biomedicine, even as scientific advances in genomics could render the issue irrelevant. It surveys the distinct politics informing the use of race in medicine and the very real health disparities caused by racism and social injustice that are now being cast as a mere function of genetic difference.
Keywords:
biomedical research,
BiDil,
drugs,
race,
biomedicine,
genomics,
racism,
health disparity,
social injustice
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2014 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780231162999 |
| Published to Columbia Scholarship Online: November 2015 |
DOI:10.7312/columbia/9780231162999.001.0001 |
