When Science, Politics, and 'Race' Collide: DNA Testing

[Beagle]

Company offers DNA tests for a fee. (Go ahead, register, it won’t kill you)

N.Y. Times: A company in Sarasota, Fla., is offering a DNA test that it says will measure customers’ racial ancestry and their ancestral proportions if they are of mixed race.

Claiming to be “the world’s first recreational genomics testing service,” the company, DNAPrint Genomics Inc., says its test will be useful for people interested in their own origins as well as for more practical purposes, like “to validate your eligibility for race-based college admissions or government entitlements.”*

A test costs $290, or $160 for an initial period, and is conducted on DNA from cells swabbed from the inside of a customer’s cheek.

**Dr. Tony Frudakis, a molecular biologist who is the company’s chief executive, said the test would help “belie the myths on which racism is based” by showing that “in all of us, especially in the U.S., there is a continuum of ancestries.”

But geneticists independent of the company expressed reservations about the accuracy of any such test, noting that there was still relatively little data about genetic differences between ethnic groups.

“It’s possible in principle to estimate the extent of admixture, but the number is not going to be very accurate,” said Dr. Stephen J. O’Brien, a population geneticist at the National Cancer Institute, referring to the proportion of different ancestry in people of mixed race.** […big 'ol snip…]

(Bolding mine)

I’ve always thought attempting to organize a color-blind society was best, albeit difficult. To me, this just confirms it.

*This is our frightening new ‘enlightened,’ ‘progressive’ racial spoils system in action. Junk science now can determine important rights or entitlements. It’s like leftist apartheid with a smiley face.

[system]

Huh.

Well, I am with the scientists in the article expressing reservations in regards to execution. The manner in which it is being presented is not encouraging, but perhaps that is just marketing speak. The underlying politicization also is not encouraging as it strikes me there is great potential of confusion between the sociological and the genetic.

Ultimately, if done well and in a rigorous scientific manner, it would be good for people to learn that the 5 race dichotomies make no sense on a genetic level.

Done poorly as junk science it simply muddies the water, and lord knows from even this board, most folks understanding of genetics is so piss-poor as to make one shudder.