Does Heart Med Breakthrough Spell Race-Based Medicine?
A new drug, called BiDil, that sharply reduces death from heart disease among African-Americans, is surely a breakthrough. But since blacks have long been under-represented in health studies, the news comes with cautionary measures. In addition, the notion of a ?race-based medicine? makes many uneasy. Marketing BiDil as a drug exclusively for blacks is ”a classical example of using race as a surrogate for biology,” Dr. Georgia Dunston, a medical geneticist at Howard University in Washington, told the New York Times. She noted that the drug may not necessarily serve only blacks. The emergence of BiDil, described last week in The New England Journal of Medicine, raises an important question: is there a biological basis for race? If there is not, as many social scientists and others argue, how can a drug like BiDil work so well in one race? sr_adspace_id = 1000001783207; sr_adspace_width = 300; sr_adspace_height = 250; sr_ad_new_window = true; sr_adspace_type = “graphic”; Advances stemm
