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Genotyping the Future: Scientists' Expectations about Race/Ethnicity after BiDil

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Richard Tutton ,
Andrew Smart ,
Paul A. Martin ,
Richard Ashcroft  and
George T. H. Ellison
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Extract

In a recent discussion about how scientific knowledge might potentially change our understanding of the nature and extent of human genetic, cultural, or biological variation, the sociologist David Skinner identified two competing visions of the future: one that was decidedly dystopian, which conjured up a “re-racialized” future, and an opposing utopian future in which the potential for racialized thinking might be finally overcome. We can situate the ongoing debates about the congestive heart failure drug BiDil, approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use only by African Americans, in relation to these differing future prospects.

When the FDA announced its approval of BiDil in June 2005, it located the drug, and perhaps the future of pharmaceutical development, within a particular vision of the future, heralding BiDil as “representing a step toward the promise of personalized medicine.” The discourse of “personalized medicine” can be characterized as part of a utopian future, one in which clinicians will be able to make increasingly individualized decisions based on each patient’s genetic makeup so that the drugs they take will be those that work best for them.

Type
Symposium
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , Fall 2008 , pp. 464 - 470
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2008

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