Developing technologies for personalized medicine may be misused to popularize the idea that one can infer a person’s genetic makeup from observer-defined or self-reported assignment to a race or ethnic group.
Medical education must acknowledge the problematic use of race as a biological or epidemiological risk factor in research and the controversy over race.
AMA J Ethics. 2017;19(6):518-527. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2017.19.6.peer1-1706.
AMA Journal of Ethics editor Audiey Kao, MD, PhD, interviewed Richard Pan, MD, MPH, about how, as a physician and legislator, he seeks to protect public health in light of recurrent outbreaks of vaccine-preventable infectious diseases.
Racial integration in American organized medicine was very slow to come, and many wrongs were committed in the name of reunifying the country's doctors after the Civil War.