5.  Schwartz, R. S. 2001. “Racial Profiling in Medical Research.” New England Journal of Medicine 344(18): 1392 – 1393.  Winker, M. A. 2004. “Measuring Race and Ethnicity: Why and How?” JAMA 292(13): 1612 – 1614.  “About Minority Health.” Center for Disease Control Office of Minority Health and Health Disparities. http://www.cdc.gov/omhd/AMH/AMH.htm http://www.cdc.gov/omhd/AMH/AMH.htm

8.  Best estimates are that anatomically modern humans migrated from Africa approximately 65,000 to 25,000 years ago  All current human populations are descended from those individuals  Because of our recent descent from common ancestors, there has been a small amount of evolutionary time for diversity to arise in human populations  Current African- Americans are descended both from African slaves and from other groups— Europeans, Native Americans, etc.  As a result, there is much genetic diversity within ethnic groups and much similarity between groups

9.  Notions of “race” vary according to time and place  In the 19th century you were a “negro” if 1/8 of your family inheritance was from slaves  In the 2000 census 14 million Americans listed themselves as belonging to at least two races  Is Barak Obama black?  Who gets counted as belonging to what group reflects a complex social labeling process  Race is in this sense “socially constructed”

14.  A common justification for slavery was that blacks were biologically, innately inferior  Scientists in the 19th and 20th centuries supported eugenics  Eugenics is the practice of restricting who gets to have children to improve the human species  PK Welpton, a demographer, said in 1938:

24.  “Ancestry” denotes those in the past that you are biological related to  Differences in ancestry can result in genetic differences  It is possible to measure genetic ancestry in various ways

25.  Some stretches of DNA – SNPs--are relatively uncommon across the world’s populations but can be unique to some subpopulations  These are called AIMs— ancestry informative markers  Researchers have collected AIMS distinctive of West African, Northern European, Native American, and other populations  These allow a blood sample of a current individual to be tested to determine what proportion of his or her genes might come from those populations

27.  National Institutes of Health grant reviewers have recently rejected grant proposals for admixture studies in part because they fear reinforcing stereotypes  A recent NY Times article identified racist web sites citing admixture results  Racial prejudice still exists and public understanding of genetics is poor  Does this justify censoring potentially important scientific findings?