Wolfgang -

I agree that the article you linked discusses some rather significant issues, and that there will be some real disputes about how they should be handled.

For the (4?) subsequent posters who didn't read it, or who had not had sufficient exposure to the questions with which it dealt, the comment about the recently approved "medicine for blacks" might be instructive, so to paraphrase from another more specific article:

A pharmaceutical firm tested a new medication on a typical diverse population, and the results indicated that it had no significant therapeutic value.

When one of their analysts isolated the "black" members of the study group, it was discovered that within that specific subgroup it had highly beneficial effect.

Additional tests were done, and at the last report I've seen, no direct/specific "genetic markers" had been found to identify who would potentially be helped and who would not, but the evidence was clear that - based on the available statistics - prescribing that medication to "black" patients, but using other treatments for non-blacks, would likely benefit the black patients. Using that drug for all patients would result in giving it to many (non-black) who would get no benefit from it.

FDA approval to market the drug specifically for "blacks" appears to have been held up for more than a couple of years just because of questions of whether it was "politically correct" to differentiate between patients in this way. I have not seen the "fact sheet" for this medication, but if reports are to be believed they probably do not tell prescribing physicians how to tell "who's black" and who's not.

The researchers, so far as I've seen, did not discriminate as to who was black and who was not-black by any particular specifc "marker" or even by any history of ancestry. It appears that they merely correleted effectiveness with an "observed characteristic" of a subgroup of the test population, or perhaps with the "Race" indicated by the test subject on check-in forms.

The question here is between "when is it appropriate to recognize a broad genetic characteristic" and "when is it not appropriate." Quite possibly, some rules need to be made, distributed, and understood.

But first we need some agreement on what is an acceptable "broad genetic characteristic" in terms that can be usefully applied. Of course some will say we shouldn't create such definitions. They could be right too.

It's quite apparent that "race" or "color" are not very good description, if only because these classification are vague and have "loaded" meanings that differ for many people. Creating new "categories of people" based on their treatment responses seems to be what's needed, but the potential for misuse and abuse of classification of persons by any such "categorizing" is, or should be, apparent.

[If the above is a bit vague, I'll plead that more coherent interpretations have not appeared in print - that I've seen.]

John