The Instrumentalist Construction of Human Diversity

• In Event: 067 - Section on Science, Knowledge and Technology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 09. Metaphors in Science and Society

Abstract

Past social science scholarship on biomedical and genetic research on human diversity has thoroughly analyzed scientists’ use of racial categories. Much of this research has been primarily concerned with understanding how the presence of socially constructed race categories in biomedical research has the potential to reify race as a biological reality. However, racial classifications make only a fraction of the wide range of population labels and “racial discourse,” used in biomedicine and across the life sciences. In this paper I offer an explanation the use and origin of ethnic, national, linguistic and regional population labels in the fields of human genetics and biomedicine and argue that analyses of race and ethnicity in biomedicine will gain analytical and critical traction by using existing theories of ethnic boundary making.
Drawing from archival sources of early research on isolated populations and adaptation I highlight the historical underpinnings of human genetics to show how theories about human populations and the scientific practices that accompany these theories have become entrenched in human genetic research. Understanding the origin of specific sampling strategies and past collaborative efforts to collect human biological and genetic samples helps answer how and why population geneticists and biomedical researchers attribute biological significance to such a wide array of group labels and provides framework for understanding the conceptual and practical flexibility of ‘population’. This has the potential to hone social constructivist analysis of science and serves to facilitate sociological analysis of science, race and ethnicity in cross-national and cross-cultural contexts beyond the U.S.

Author

• Santiago José Molina, University of California-Berkeley