ASHG 2008: Health, ancestry and Montel Williams
Ancestry testing can be a sensitive subject as evident in a packed morning session discussing some of the social and education aspects of ancestry and genealogical testing. While genetics has a long and sordid past with the term race, it remains a fact (possibly as a vestige of how populations have been studied) that ethnic groups show distinct genetic signatures associate with commonly delineated ethnic groups, and there could be health benefits to using this information. Esteban Gonzalez Burchard at the University of California San Francisco studies African American and Latin American groups. He talked of one project on Multiple Sclerosis that he had been collaborating with. Multiple Sclerosis is predominantly a disease affecting people of European descent. Africans are rarely affected. So his group sent out requests for African Americans affected by the disease and used ancestry specific markers to zero in on portions of the individual’s genomes that might identify a European risk factor migrating through the genome. U.S. Television talk show host Montel Williams was a volunteer.
The series of talks ended with some rather passionate debate about the value of race as a term or even as a concept. While one questioner approaching the microphone at the end of the presentations pressed the panel and all in attendence to end its "love affair with the term." "Given that science has clearly shown that humans don’t meet the biological definition for race, why can’t science provide some leadership?" A genetic counselor was equally adamant that we don't avoid such terms just in the interest of being PC if they can provide useful health information.
