Medicine’s long held obsession with the white male has certainly not come to an end, but it does seem to be lessening over the past few years. More and more, we’re finding that therapies originally tested on white men don’t necessarily work well for members of the opposite sex or other races, and scientists have been trying to work out why.

In today’s session called “Genetic Targeting of Drug Therapies”, Esteban Burchard of the University of California, San Francisco discussed differences in how Latino populations respond to the popular asthma medication albuterol. He found that Puerto Rican kids were less likely to benefit from the drug than Mexican children, and has been narrowing in on some of the reasons why.

It’s always striking how tough these studies are, given so many confounding non-genetic differences in environment, diet, and economic class. But when Burchard set out to determine the genetic origins of Latino ethnic groups, he found another complicating factor – how do we really know what race we belong to, anyway?

Burchard found that Mexicans and Puerto Ricans populations differed in the proportion of genetic regions that came from African, Native American, and European lineages. Mexicans, for example, had more regions that were similar to Native American genotypes. But if you looked at individual members of his studies, the variability in genetic makeup was astounding. For example, some participants who insisted that they were Puerto Rican were 100% European, while others were nearly 100% African.

Burchard says he’s developing statistical methods to incorporate that data into his analysis, but one conclusion is clear: “We don’t really know who we are,” he said.