Project Summary
Over the past decade, “diversity” has become a sine qua non of genomic research through such
programs as the Precision Medicine Initiative and related efforts to build massive genetic data
bases. This book will examine the biomedical, social, legal, commercial, and policy implications
of diversity’s emergence as a central organizing concept animating an array of programs and
research agendas aimed at driving forward genomic innovation. As diversity has come to the
fore as a central organizing concept of modern genomic research and policy, distinctions
between social and biological rationales for foregrounding racial categories in genomic
enterprises have become conflated, confused, and confounded. Such conceptual
entanglements have profound implications both for our on-going understandings of the nature of
human similarly/difference and for concomitant allocation of goods, resources, and status
relating to race and race-relations in society today.
These initiatives present a double-pronged re-reification of race as genetic: First, through the
conflation of socially defined racial groups with distinctive and discrete genetic clusters; and
Second, through the molecularization of social phenomena that disparately impact racial
groups. The former threatens to reinvigorate dangerous, reductive, and racist constructions of
race as genetic; the latter threatens to geneticize health disparities themselves, both blaming
the victims and directing attention away from the social, legal, and political initiatives that need
to be undertaken in order to address such problems.
Diversity is a concept ready-made for conflating racial and genetic categories because diversity
itself has roots in both worlds. Diversity is a useful concept, but like race itself, it can be hard to
define and even harder to use in a productive way that avoids the dangers of genetic
essentialism and racial reification. Hence the need to identify and address these challenges in
each new manifestation as they arise. To do this, it is necessary to trace the stories of these
different forms of diversity through a book-length treatment that will allow for a full exploration
and analysis of the complexities of managing race and diversity at the intersections of law,
politics, and biomedicine. Having traced the progression of the entanglements of diversities from
the 1970s to the present-day, the book will draw practical lessons and propose concrete
suggestions for the more careful, deliberate, and productive management of race and
representation in the intersecting domains of biomedicine, law, and politics.