Wrapping Up Diversity Week: Genomics in Retrospect

       Every year the Multicultural Center holds a variety of workshops and events in a span of one week. Diversity Week, as it is called, aims to unite the campus community in celebration of cultural diversity, identity, and values. The single week draws in hundreds of students, faculty, and community members--all gathered to see dances from other continents, learn about a blood transfusion process, or even to get a tour of the campus botanical gardens!

   This year marked the 14th annual commemoration of Diversity Week, collaborated in part with the university's College of Environmental and Life Sciences. The resulting list of workshops was a treat for a science admirers and for the curious at heart.

       I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Duana Fullwiley, a guest speaker for the Honors Colloquium, over dinner sponsored by the Honors Program, before attending her presentation in Edwards Auditorium. She was very knowledgeable and personable, fielding student questions on the logistics behind genomics and specificities. Her perspective on the issue soon became evident—race, she said, is the product of our social categorization. In science and medicine, race forces pieces together that do not necessarily fit. BiDil, she cites as an example, is a pharmaceutical drug openly marketed and developed for African American patients with heart disease. She raises questions on why this drug is listed primarily for African Americans and what it means for the future of our health care. She continued to elaborate that race, by scientific standards, is established by using a scale put together by a select group of people that decided the determination of each race is dependent upon the presence of a fixed percentage of arbitrary genes. Someone may self-identify themself as a certain race, but their genetic make-up could classify them as otherwise. Race, Fullwiley argues, tries to form a correlation between individuals in hopes of creating a one-fit solution. Instead, she suggests that geneticists should divert their focus on matters such as finding specific genes for medical conditions and developing medications catered to work on those molecular sites. By this method, she believes that pharmaceuticals will rear better results—using a more scientific approach rather than the shifty lens of race.

       Thursday evening Dr. Esteban González Burchard held a related presentation in Chafee where he expressed his thoughts on the matter, stating that race—or ancestry, as he preferred to call it—is a vital tool in science and a stable foundation in medicine. He showed a myriad of graphs and stated that ancestry has been shown to have a large influence in our lives—including the determination of our life partners. Marriage, he said, is not primarily determined by love. We pick our partners based on socioeconomic standards, their level education of education, and how similar they are to us. He added that recent research shows that ancestry may even play a larger role in spousal choice, directing the audience attention to charts showing a high percentage of Latin American couples who resided in New York. He suggests that this number has more to do with ancestry than with emotional ties, et cetera. Burchard believes that ancestry is meant to serve as a starting point. Although the ultimate goal is to compare genetic markers, it would be far too costly to sequence the genome of every single person on earth at the rate of five thousand dollars a person. The more economical choice, rather, would be to have a controlled sampling of certain populations in order to build a baseline. He briefly references to standards behind race classification, stating that from a few continents, locations were chosen in which respective inhabitants’ genes served as the definition for their “race” or “ancestry.” Thus, race in scientific standards, would then be defined by a small sampling of the entire world population. Burchard goes on to state that ancestry is a difficult spectrum because individuals may self-identify themselves as a certain race that does not correlate with scientific standards, making prescribed medications ineffective since they are tailored to a specific group. This leads to a high incidence of illness and failure rates. Burchard concludes his presentation saying that ancestry is a resourceful tool in the field of genetic research and should garner more time and attention from the scientific world.

       Dr. Fullwiley and Dr. Burchard both presented great points and potential directions on where genomics and medicine should venture next. They raised ethical and theoretical questions our society needs to consider in an age of advancing technology and developing medicine. Does the future of medicine lie within our genes? Does genomic sequencing open doors for discrimination or violate one's privacy? We still have a ways to go, but the what ifs could very well be a reality sooner than we think.

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Holly Tran, Staff Writer, is currently a sophomore at the University of Rhode Island pursing a major in Biological Sciences.