Outside scientists said the study drives home the important differences between race and genetic ancestry. \u201cThe clear message here is that these are two distinct constructs, they mean different things, and they should not be used interchangeably,\u201d said Luisa Borrell, a social epidemiologist at the CUNY School of Public Health who worked on a 2023 National Academies report on the use of race in genetics research<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Jonathan Kahn, a legal and historical scholar at Northeastern Law School who just published a book<\/a> on the use of diversity in biology and in law, added, \u201cI thought it was thoughtful and much more nuanced than the kind of language geneticists were using about race and variation, even five years ago, let alone 20 years ago. There was a lot of movement towards a subtler, more well-considered examination and articulation of relationships between race and genetic variation.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t\tA STAT Investigation: Embedded Bias<\/a><\/p>\n The study mapped people\u2019s self-reported race with their genetic ancestry, and through several different analyses, it points to a much fuzzier understanding of race, as opposed to thinking of racial groups as distinct and easily defined.<\/p>\n In one case, it used body mass index as an example of how broad racial categories can be misleading. The study found that those with West African ancestry were predisposed to have a high BMI while those with East African ancestry were predisposed to not have a high BMI, but those groups may be lumped together if a study just accounts for someone having African ancestry.\u00a0<\/p>\n The study also revealed how differences in race mapped out across the United States, which is likely the result of migration to different parts of the country from different parts of the world. The paper also hones in on Latinos as an example where a socially defined group of people doesn\u2019t map neatly onto genetic ancestry.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAs a representation of the general U.S. population and how complicated it is, this is a pretty big advance, and an important set of results,\u201d said Sasha Gusev, a statistical geneticist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He noted that other studies have pointed out the incongruence between race and genetic ancestry, but those have typically been from smaller biobanks that intentionally collect data from racially minoritized groups. He added that the kind of geographic analyses the study did could only be done because it was a national cohort. \u201cIt also speaks to the fact that not only is racial self-identification a construct, but it\u2019s one that differs across different parts of the country.\u201d<\/p>\n The study could have a profound influence on the way geneticists conduct and frame their work. Historically, the idea that race was inextricably linked to biology was used to justify health disparities and other forms of racial bias.\u00a0<\/p>\n There has generally been two camps in the field \u2014 one that claims race is a social construct and a biological understanding of race is too simplistic, and the other that says race is a discrete, identifiable group and is the primary driver in a person\u2019s trajectory. The new study reinforces the shortfalls of using socially defined racial categories in genetics work.<\/p>\n \u201cRace and ethnicity are poor proxies for genetic ancestry; therefore, biomedical research should adjust directly for ancestries estimated from genetic data rather than relying on self-identified race or ethnicity,\u201d the study\u2019s lead author, Charles Rotimi, scientific director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, wrote in an email to reporters.\u00a0<\/p>\n Just minutes after that email was sent, an NIH spokesperson responded, \u201cHi all \u2013 please hold on using these responses until you hear from me,\u201d but did not follow up by the time of publication.<\/p>\n STAT reached out to the paper\u2019s co-authors outside of the NIH. Only one responded, writing that \u201call communication related to the paper is under review by HHS, and we do not have approval to participate in press interviews.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The screening of scientists\u2019 communications contrasts with NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya\u2019s promise to foster a culture of free speech<\/a>. Bhattacharya\u2019s boss, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has similarly pledged to promote \u201cradical transparency.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n After publication, NIH made Rotimi available for an interview. He said the study results point to race being the wrong way to think about a person\u2019s risk of disease \u2014 and should encourage researchers to think of people on a more individual level. The results don\u2019t necessarily invalidate previous work that has found genetic differences between races, he said, but \u201cthose past findings are not as precise as they should have been, or they should be. As we gather more data with large cohorts like All of Us, we should be in a better position to truly characterize people.\u201d<\/p>\n A fraught history<\/p>\n The current study is part of a long and often-fraught history of geneticists and ideas of race.\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t\tThe NIH called my health equity research \u2018antithetical to scientific inquiry\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n Since Charles Darwin proposed the basics of what would become the field of genetics, people have tried to apply its principles to racial groups. Soon after Darwin proposed his theory of evolution, his cousin, Francis Galton, created the foundations of what would become the eugenics movement<\/a>. On the first page of his book \u201cHereditary Genius,\u201d Galton writes he was interested in understanding \u201cthe mental peculiarities of different races.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cHe spent his career trying to, in the primitive ways that were available at the time, prove that Europeans were biologically superior. It\u2019s continuous, since then, it\u2019s never, ever been dropped,\u201d said Eric Turkheimer, a behavior geneticist at the University of Virginia who has written about the way Trump\u2019s Make America Great Again movement could affect the field of genomics<\/a>.<\/p>\n The All of Us cohort was launched in 2018<\/a> to create a database of genetic data that more accurately represented the U.S. \u2014 but even it has had a spotty past when it comes to discussing race.<\/p>\n The program caught some flak last year<\/a> for a paper published by some of its scientists because it used a method of genetic visualization, called UMAP, that can artificially create distinct clusters in data. Several geneticists argued that it amplified genetic differences in racial groups in a misleading way. The worry at the time was that it could send the message that it was reifying a genetic basis for racial groups, a concern that was only amplified because genetics research has at times been used to justify white supremacy<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe majority of population geneticists try not to promote the narrative that there are these discrete genetic racial clusters, because that\u2019s not what the data tells us, not what the last 70 years of research tell us,\u201d said Jedidiah Carlson, a population geneticist who has studied how some population genetics data are used in right-wing circles<\/a>. While he has not studied the 2024 paper specifically, he did note it seems to be shared frequently by conservatives.<\/p>\n \u2018Open to interpretation\u2019<\/p>\n The new paper does not mince words in its recommendation to scientists, but how it may be interpreted by the general public is much harder to pin down.\u00a0<\/p>\n While the text and analyses of the paper point to race being a social construct, the way that the paper still leans on ancestry by subcontinental groups could allow for people to interpret the paper as simply calling for more granular racial categories.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can build a narrative around this that says, \u2018Our socially constructed view is completely true.\u2019 You can also build another view, which is, \u2018It\u2019s a little different than we thought it was back in the day. But the socially defined races look like they have pretty different ancestry components,\u2019\u201d said Aaron Panofsky, the director of the Institute for Society and Genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has studied how conservatives have used genetics<\/a>. He said that the paper is written in such a way that it \u201cdoes not just double down on all these straightforward, old-style ways of talking about it, but it can\u2019t emancipate itself from the problematic space of race and ethnicity. In some ways, it slips back in, and I believe it contradicts it. I think it\u2019s very open to interpretation. It doesn\u2019t settle anything.\u201d<\/p>\n Another potential interpretation is that the paper supports the rationale the NIH has used in recent weeks when terminating research grants it deems related to DEI, which states<\/a>, \u201cResearch programs based primarily on artificial and non-scientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives, are antithetical to the scientific inquiry.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\t\t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/EmbeddedBias_Wordpress_LinkPostImage-768x432.jpg\")
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