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Duster found the conversations alarming. His book, Backdoor to Eugenics, aimed to stimulate public debate by showing how genetic-screening policies tended to reinforce the power structures already within society. Since then, he has pressed geneticists and molecular biologists to consider the social meaning that emerges from what they perceive as unbiased fact.
At first they resisted. As a member of the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications Working Group advising the agencies on human genome research, Duster urged the NIH and the Department of Energy to challenge The Bell Curve, the 1994 best-seller that argued that race correlated with intelligence. Government officials held up a response for eight months, convinced that the nonexistence of race at the genome level spoke for itself.
Duster, along with fellow committee member Dorothy Nelkin of New York University, highlighted the ways in which cultural context influences the application of medical and behavioral genetics. Now Collins is relying on Duster and other collaborators, such as University of Wisconsin molecular biologist Pilar Ossorio, to help explain why race must be acknowledged even if it is biologically inconsequential. "It's a tightrope between trying to rescue the importance and meaning of research on race without giving it a false reality," Duster says.
Indeed, although he maintains that race is significant in genetics, Duster insists it is misleading to reinscribe race as a definitive system to group people who share geographic origins and thus some genes. For one, concepts of race vary geographically as well as historically. The ethnic status of South Asians, for example, has changed over the past century in the U.S. and more often serves to define a political and cultural "other" than something biological.
How it's done...
Originally Posted by PostmodernProphet
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