Race and ancestry in biomedical research: exploring the challenges

Recent advances in biomedical research promise increasing insights into complex contributions to traits and diseases, and there is hope that these will lead to global health benefits [1,2]. Analytical and social-justice considerations both recommend thoughtful assessment of the role of social identity, particularly racial or ethnic identity, in the design, conduct and dissemination of clinical and basic science research. Controversies ranging from James Watson's comments on racial differences in intelligence [3] to the adoption of racially targeted pharmaceuticals, such as the African-American heart-failure drug BiDil [4-7], remind us that use of the concept of race in biomedical research can have far-reaching, often unanticipated social consequences.The problem of race in scientific research is not a new one, and the issue seems to perpetually reappear and remain fundamentally unresolved [8]. We are, however, entering a new era in which the fruits of initiatives, such as the Human Genome Project [9,10], the International Haplotype Map Project [11], and the recently proposed 1000 Genomes Project [12], promise to elaborate more fully than ever before the nature and extent of human genetic variation and its relation to social identity. A recent interdisciplinary workshop, 'Ancestry in health and medicine; expanding the debate', hosted by the Alberta Health Law Institute and the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health, in Toronto, Canada, sought to debate the current status and concerns surrounding these new scientific data, how we relate genetic variation to individual and population-level differences in observable traits, and what this might mean for the effective addressing of significant disparities in health status and disease. A central motivating consideration was how best to secure the anticipated benefits of genetic and related forms of biomedical research in the face of inevitable misunderstandings or misuse concerning genetic variation and race.Here, we d