Opinion

Categorization of humans in biomedical research: genes, race and disease

Neil Risch^1,2 , Esteban Burchard³, Elad Ziv³ and Hua Tang⁴

¹Department of Genetics, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305-5120, USA

²Division of Research, Kaiser Permanente, Oakland, CA 94611-5714, USA

³Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, CA 94143, USA

⁴Department of Statistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA

author email corresponding author email

Genome Biology 2002, 3:comment2007.1-2007.12doi:10.1186/gb-2002-3-7-comment2007

Published:	1 July 2002

Subject areas: Genetics, Medicine, Drug discovery, Evolution, Genome studies

Abstract

A debate has arisen regarding the validity of racial/ethnic categories for biomedical and genetic research. Some claim 'no biological basis for race' while others advocate a 'race-neutral' approach, using genetic clustering rather than self-identified ethnicity for human genetic categorization. We provide an epidemiologic perspective on the issue of human categorization in biomedical and genetic research that strongly supports the continued use of self-identified race and ethnicity.