What is Race?

To the two well-paid and utterly sold out negros pictured here, it's about money. Simple as that - and good science be damned.

Relevant Financial Relationships
Keith C. Ferdinand, MD, has indicated relevant financial relationships as noted: he is a consultant/speaker for Pfizer Inc, AstraZeneca, Merck, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation.

Frank Douglas is the former Professor of the Practice at MIT and director of MIT's Center for Biomedical Innovation. He also serves on the board of directors of several pharmaceutical companies, including NitroMed, which developed the drug BiDil.

In the past, African American-only trials have received considerable attention. The heart disease drug BiDil, for example, which Ferdinand helped to study, was the first drug in the US approved for and marketed to just one race of patients. Jonathan Kahn, a law professor at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn., who has been an outspoken critic of BiDil's marketing approach, said that "it sends dangerous messages that race is somehow genetic." Which it is not, Charles Rotimi, the director of the National Human Genome Center at Howard University in Washington, DC, told The Scientist. While race can be useful to understand how diseases manifest in certain groups, hinging studies on race distracts from the underlying causes of health disparities, Kahn said.

The problem with using race as a marker is that any one self-identified group is never homogeneous - there are always more variations genetically within a racial group than between them, he said. "Human variations do not overlap with our notions of race,"

The Scientist: Race-Based Medicine?