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Group Categories in Pharmacogenetics Research

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Lisa Gannett
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Abstract

Current controversy over whether the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) system of racial and ethnic classification should be used in pharmacogenetics research as suggested by the U.S. Federal Drug Administration (FDA) has been couched in terms of realist-social constructionist debates on race. The assumptions both parties to these debates share instead need to be relinquished—specifically, dichotomies between the social and scientific and what is descriptive and evaluative/normative. This paper defends a pragmatic approach to the question of the appropriateness of the OMB group categories in pharmacogenetics research, an approach that is local and context-specific rather than global, incorporates practical and ethical as well as theoretical dimensions, and recognizes intersections of the social and the biological in the constitution of group categories.

Type
Race and Science
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 72 , Issue 5: Proceedings of the 2004 Biennial Meeting of The Philosophy of Science Association. Part I: Contributed Papers , December 2005 , pp. 1232 - 1247
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

I would like to thank Wendy Hui Kyong Chun for the conference invitation which initiated this paper. Besides PSA 2004, versions of the paper were presented in Fall 2003 at Harvard University's Color Lines Conference and Canadian and Pacific SWIP conferences, and during 2004 to philosophy departments at Cape Breton University, Saint Mary's University, University of Tennessee-Knoxville, and University at Albany–SUNY, and the history and philosophy of science department at Indiana University. My thanks to conference organizers and all of these audiences for their helpful comments and generous hospitality, and to Melinda Fagan, Malia Fullerton, Jim Griesemer, and Kathleen Okruhlik whose contributions made this a better paper.

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