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The “Contemporary Synthesis”
When Politically Inclusive Genomic Science
Relies on Biological Notions of Race

By Duana Fullwiley*

ABSTRACT

This essay outlines the emergence of a contemporary synthesis regarding racial thinking
in genetic science and in society more broadly. A departure from what Julian Huxley in
1942 termed the “modern synthesis,” the contemporary version does not purport to leave
race thinking behind in favor of evolution, population genetics, and population-based
accounts of natural selection and human diversity. Specifically, the contemporary synthe-
sis blends old concepts (such as that of pure human “types,” located within continental
land masses) with new attitudes (democratic inclusion, multicultural diversity, and anti-
racism). Through various examples, the essay shows how this new synthesis combines
ideas about human biological difference that draw on measures of physical characteristics
and human genetic material that are both race and population based, yet conflated. This
specific amalgam allows old notions of racial types to thrive through conceptual framings
that comprise ideas that were once imagined to have the potential to liberate society from
racial thinking—and that today remain attached to ideas of progress. As an emergent
dynamic, the contemporary synthesis holds the possibility of reinvigorating racism, while
simultaneously possessing the potential to promote antiracist science education, disease
awareness, and social justice efforts.

I N HER NOW-CLASSIC WORK The Idea of Race in Science, the historian Nancy
Stepan’s principal concern was to “point out the deeper continuities found in racial
science underlying discontinuities and change on the surface.” With this she hoped to
trouble a field interest for the history of science: that of possible “scientific revolution.”1
Such a stern focus on the persistence of race still makes sense so that we might diagnose
its wide-ranging and often contradictory legacy. We also have to be careful, however, not
to overdichotomize change versus core consistencies as scholars of the contemporary
moment engage with historians on this issue. In fact, certain “discontinuities” regarding

* Department of Anthropology, Stanford University, 450 Serra Mall, Building 50, Stanford, California
94305-2034.
This work was funded by the National Science Foundation, Grant no. 0849109.
1 Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800 –1960 (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. xxi.

Isis, 2014, 105:803– 814

©2014 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.
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race in the practice of science highlight dynamics and political shifts that amount to
change that is joined at the hip to stasis. It is my view that the changing political
articulation of race in contemporary science allows for core racial beliefs to remain intact.
Today, many genetic scientists deploy a powerful mix of concepts. On the one hand,
they openly accept and operationalize highly racializing notions of “Old World” human
“types.” On the other hand, they themselves—as well as various humanities scholars and
social scientists who embrace their work—leave these ideas largely unquestioned when
they utilize them for liberalizing, educational, genealogical, and antiracism efforts. I argue
that we are witnessing an absorption of the old race thinking into modern race projects of
a liberal persuasion. I call this confluence the “contemporary synthesis.”
In the years between the 1993 National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act, which
sought to include underrepresented groups in science, and the 2003 Map of the Human
Genome, two scientific racial ideas that seemed politically opposed on the surface
effortlessly combined. On the one hand, scientists and policy makers mandated inclusion
and increased representation of minorities in medical research. This was largely argued in
social justice terms.2 On the other hand, a group of highly vocal scientists advanced the
idea that there could be a genetic basis for racial disparities in health. They started to look
at genetic differences within people classed according to U.S. racial categories and also
argued that these broad categories might form genetic clusters.3 They began formulating
their case in 2000, when leaders of the Human Genome Project announced that the human
genome contained no real racial differences and that we are all just one race—“the human
race.”4 By 2003, those who disagreed had penned a series of articles, organized confer-
ences, and formed networks and collaborations. These “just one race” detractors were not
scientific racists. Several of them came from minority groups and had embraced the logic
of the Health Revitalization Act as it sought to include underrepresented groups in science.
Only now, the political inclusion of minorities for which they were advocating centered
on inclusion within genetic and genomic studies.
In this essay I examine the ways that scientists and nonscientists deploy racialized
genetics to address racial problems in society. The technologies in question have been
developed in academic labs as basic scientific tools for use in forensics, in the elucidation
of genetic components of disease, and in proposals to reduce the disease burden in
minority communities. The researchers involved in such work believe that there is at some
level a biogenetic reality to race categories. Not to explore it, they argue, would be
tantamount to racism and a disservice to minority communities.5 With these concerns,

2 Steve Epstein, Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press,

2007).
3 Neil Risch, Esteban Buchard, Elad Ziv, and Hua Tang, “Categorization of Humans in Biomedical Research:

Genes, Race, and Disease,” Genome Biology, 2002, 3(7):1–12. See also Francis Collins, “What We Do and
Don’t Know about ‘Race,’ ‘Ethnicity,’ Genetics, and Health at the Dawn of the Genome Era,” Nature Genetics
Supplement, 2004, 36:S13–S15; Burchard, Ziv, Natasha Coyle, et al., “The Importance of Race and Ethnic
Background in Biomedical Research and Clinical Practice,” New England Journal of Medicine, 2003, 348:
1170 –1175; and Tony Frudakis and Mark Shriver, U.S. Patent No. 20040229231 (filed 18 Nov. 2004),
“Compositions and Methods for Inferring Ancestry.”
4 At this celebratory moment, Francis Collins, who led the NIH-funded arm of the effort, told the world: “I’m happy

that today the only race we are talking about is the human race”; the remark was met with applause. See White House,
Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by the President, Prime Minister Tony Blair of England, Dr. Francis Collins,
Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and Dr. Craig Venter, President and Chief Scientific
Officer, Celera Genomics Corporation, on the Completion of the First Survey of the Entire Human Genome Project,”
2000, http://clinton3.nara.gov/WH/EOP/OSTP/html/00628_2.html (accessed 1 Feb. 2014).
5 Risch et al., “Categorization of Humans in Biomedical Research” (cit. n. 3); Carlos D. Bustamante,
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scientists and their tools often leave the lab and enter into social fields such as education, S
law, genealogical societies, public health, media, and commerce.
The geneticists who describe DNA differences between groups that were historically
thought of as racially distinct do so by adopting the scientific term “bio-geographical
ancestry” or, simply, “genetic ancestry.” The determination of ancestry through autosomal
DNA analysis relies on human genetic sampling in discrete geographical continental
regions. It requires limiting history to two “depth of time” scales: the twenty-first-century
“present” and the Age of Conquest “past,” when the populations of the “New World”
encountered each other. That is when the sexual politics of enslavement and conquest
resulted in new dynamics of genetic mixing that are imagined not to have taken place
before. When present-day people display such mixing, geneticists term this “admixture.”
As I show in more detail below, at their core bio-geographical ancestry notions rely on
typological human categories that serve as the referents for any human sample being
analyzed. The same applies to the many technologies that rely on autosomal DNA markers
for ancestry tests available today.
A departure from what Julian Huxley in 1942 termed the “modern synthesis,” the
contemporary version does not purport to leave race thinking behind in favor of evolution,
population genetics, and population-based accounts of natural selection and human di-
versity.6 The modern synthesis thinkers eventually decided that these emphases would
lead to a kind of salvational and “humanist progress.”7 Today we are seeing a new
synthesis of race science, which also imagines itself as progress. Specifically, the con-
temporary synthesis blends old concepts (such as that of “pure types,” located within
continental land masses) with newer attitudes (“democratic inclusion,” “multicultural
diversity,” and “antiracism”).8 All the while, this synthesis combines ideas about human

Francisco M. De La Vega, and Esteban G. Burchard, “Genomics for the World,” Nature, 2011, 475:163–165;
and personal communication with the geneticist Rick Kittles.
6 Peter Bowler writes of the modern synthesis: “The old typological and developmental viewpoints were

giving way to a perspective in which adaptation, migration, isolation, and geographical distribution played more
important roles. Field naturalists now realized that each species could not be treated as a fixed type with only
local variations. Many species were broken up into a collection of subpopulations by geographical barriers, and
each population was adapting to its own local environment the best it could.” Peter Bowler, Evolution: The
History of an Idea (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1984), p. 334. See also Theodore Dobzhansky, Genetics
and the Origin of Species, 3rd ed. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1951); and Julian Huxley, Evolution: The
Modern Synthesis (1942; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010).
7 Julian Huxley, The Humanist Frame (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961). In the 1960s Huxley

eventually comes to see cultural progress as the result of evolution being self-aware in the mind of “man.”
He writes, “Today, in twentieth-century man, the evolutionary process is at last becoming conscious of
itself and is beginning to study itself with a view to directing its future directions. Human knowledge
worked over by human imagination is seen as the basis of human understanding and belief, and the ultimate
guide to human progress” (p. 7).
8 In 2008 I discussed these issues in an ethnographic account of how self-identified minority scientists work

to redress past racist inequities through genome science so as to “include” minorities in the genomic revolution.
I also discussed their explicit acknowledgment that their work is “political.” They aspire to embed an aspect of
societal equity in their research, even as they realize that they are biologizing minority health disparities in the
process. See Duana Fullwiley, “The Biologistical Construction of Race: ‘Admixture’ Technology and the New
Genetic Medicine,” Social Studies of Science, 2008, 38:695–735, esp. pp. 710, 726. Other scholars have since
made similar observations. See Nadia Abu-El Haj, The Genealogical Science (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press,
2012), pp. 137–138; Catherine Bliss, Race Decoded: The Genomic Fight for Social Justice (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford Univ. Press, 2012); and Jenny Reardon, “The Democratic, Anti-Racist Genome? Technoscience at the
Limits of Liberalism,” Science as Culture, 2012, 21:25– 48. In her earlier work, Race to the Finish: Identity and
Governance in an Age of Genomics, Reardon discusses the difficulty that well-meaning scientists have in seeing
the ways that populations felt threatened by the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP). She makes the point
that many HGDP geneticists, such as Mary-Claire King, were liberal, politically progressive scientists who had
worked for social justice. By and large, the geneticists in her account did not see their science in the HGDP as
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biological difference that draw on measures of physical characteristics and human bio-
logical material that are both race and population based. Specifically, it allows old notions
of race types to thrive through conceptual framings that comprise ideas that were once
imagined to have the potential to liberate society from racial thinking. These are allelic
frequency distribution across populations, careful descriptors of ancestry, and health
disparities as an effect of social and historical racial inequality.
The institutional and the societal domains where this newly capacious racial science is
evident have the potential to affect critical aspects of human life today. These domains are
health (regarding groups’ differential risks for disease), notions of the self and identity
(regarding genetic ancestry testing), and rights within the law (regarding forensics and law
enforcement).9 First I will revisit the basic characteristics of old race thinking that are
detailed by Stepan and review her tentative hope in the 1980s, following the anthropol-
ogist George Stocking, for the disappearance of race in science.10 Then I will show how
the material and conceptual aspects of race science within genomics today rely heavily on
notions of both race and population. Finally, I will note two brief examples of the
contemporary synthesis in action.

BUILDING RACE: OLD AND NEW CONSTRUCTIONS

In the last chapter of The Idea of Race in Science Stepan comes to a “preliminary”
conclusion that “race has lost its reality and naturalness, to such an extent that probably
the majority of scientists even go so far as to consider the very word ‘race’ unnecessary
for purposes of biological analysis.” Her view at the time of writing was that the latter part
of the twentieth century saw a “decline of the old racial science and the emergence of a
new, non-racial, populational, genetical science of human diversity.” In the history she
details, race disappeared in large part because population genetics was so conceptually
compelling and rigorous by comparison. She juxtaposes the then-modern period with the
old regime through a reliance on race versus population, respectively. “The fundamental
unit of analysis in the old racial science was the human race or racial ‘type.’ Races were
defined anatomically and morphologically, in terms of the phenotype—that is, by detailed
measurements of the shape of the skull, the dimensions of the post-cranial skeleton, by
stature and by skin colour.” She continues: “The unit of analysis in the new biology was,
by contrast, not the race but the ‘population,’ defined not morphologically or behav-
iourally but genetically and statistically.” Finally, she notes that many of the modern
synthesis thinkers still allowed themselves to apply population thinking to races, where
race as “population” could be seen in genetic terms. Still, she argues, these applications
“were not sufficient for recognising a ‘race’ or for distinguishing it from any other
arbitrary portion of the species.”11
Today scientific teams most wedded to the concept of a genetic basis for race have
constructed models of U.S. population genetic history that begin with the conquest of the
New World in 1492. In an effort to recreate the past scene of what is now called “genetic

inherently political but, rather, framed the protests against it by indigenous peoples as political. See Reardon,
Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press,
2004), pp. 113, 158 –159.
9 See Duana Fullwiley, “Can DNA ‘Witness’ Race? Forensic Uses of an Imperfect Ancestry Testing

Technology,” in Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture, ed. Sheldon Krimsky and
Kathleen Sloan (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2011), pp. 116 –126.
10 Stepan, Idea of Race in Science (cit. n. 1), pp. 171–172.
11 Ibid., pp. 171, 176, 177.
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admixture” in the bodies of U.S. minorities (specifically of African Americans, Latinos, S
and Native Americans), the scientists in question attempt to model the colonial encounter
through collecting DNA from people whom they consider to be from Old World popu-
lations, a designation based on samples’ real or imagined continents of origin.12
In my ethnographic work with several labs where scientists have developed and
promoted bio-geographical ancestry testing, I have seen a commonly shared process that
involves procuring DNA samples from so-called Old World individuals who now live in
West Africa, East Asia, and Western Europe. My informants also attempt to reconstruct
a terrain called “Pre-Columbian Native America” in order to obtain DNA from people
who reside in the Americas (usually as part of federally recognized tribes). They then
compile DNA markers that occur at relatively high frequencies in the people they have
classed as historically and relatively pure. Through a careful construction, they keep these
Old World groups’ boundaries intact as types by creating statistical thresholds for a series
of alleles (genetic markers) that come to constitute panels of “Ancestry Informative
Markers,” or AIMs. From these they create a model that compares allelic frequency
distributions of DNA linked to specific traits within the political boundaries that name
people as Africans, Asians, Europeans, and Native Americans. In this way scientists
render these groups as genetically distinct from one another. They also artificially privi-
lege these specific demarcations for sorting human genetic diversity globally.
This can only happen once processes of “filtering,” as the geneticists in question call it,
take place. That is, all of the Old World human DNA variants that make it into the schema
of four distinct referent populations undergo a process of purification that eliminates the
obstacle of their genetic heterogeneity. In other words, the genetic markers that West
Africans, for example, share are separated out from those that they do not share.13 This
sorting takes place through statistical analyses that assess the probability that select alleles
will occur at a lower or greater frequency in one of the geographically based, circum-
scribed populations. This scientific practice of DNA-based group homogenization allows
the biologist to perform the task of selectively differentiating between any two “conti-
nental populations” of “Africans” and “Europeans,” or “Africans” and “Native Ameri-
cans,” and so on. Finally, study participants in today’s New World are tested for these
panels of markers to infer how “African,” “Asian,” “European,” or “Native American”
they are. Applications of this technology are now used routinely in medical studies to
match cases and controls, in recreational genealogical pursuits to see how one’s identity
and genetic biology compare, and in forensic searches where eyewitness accounts are
deemed unreliable in describing the race of the perpetrator.14
Many of these Ancestry Informative Markers are specific DNA sequence changes that
have been under selection pressure for their role in some biological function (they are

12 In my work I have also witnessed what the anthropologist Michael Montoya describes as an effort on the

part of scientists to engage some aspect of the history of colonized and enslaved peoples. When doing so, this
historical consciousness forms part of their political articulation that they themselves are aware of racial
exploitation and racist legacies that affect the populations they study today. See Michael Montoya, Making the
Mexican Diabetic: Race, Science, and the Genetics of Inequality (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 2011), p.
162.
13 As one research group clearly states: “The purpose of these filters was to eliminate SNPs [Single Nucleotide

Polymorphisms] with substantially heterogeneous allele frequencies within populations of the same continental
origin. These exclusions resulted in a final genomewide set of 4,222 SNP AIMs.” Chao Tian et al., “A
Genomewide Single-Nucleotide–Polymorphism Panel with High Ancestry Information for African American
Admixture Mapping,” American Journal of Human Genetics, 2006, 79:640 – 649, on p. 642.
14 Fullwiley, “Can DNA ‘Witness’ Race? (cit. n. 9).
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Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms, or SNPs). For instance, several powerful markers in

this schema are DNA changes for West Africans that protect against vivax malaria or that
are involved in proteins that confer dark or light skin color; others include those that code
for red hair and freckles, traits often associated with Northern Europeans. By bringing the
biological material markers and symbolic historical markers (such as the pivotal date of
1492) into view as protagonists of sorts, one can begin to see how concepts of race now
borrow the tools of statistical population genetics, albeit selectively. Here the population
is race, and race is the population. The scientific frame for thinking about human diversity,
however, has been constrained significantly, to four essential groups, for the purposes of
the time scale in question. Nonetheless, scientists and others increasingly report that the
language of genetic ancestry allows them to distance themselves from the baggage of
“race” as a term. Many believe that the wording of “ancestry” is simply more precise and
objective and that it provides a better vision, scientifically and politically, of New World
biology than race concepts, such as the “one drop” rule.15 (“One drop” refers to the fact
that historically, in the United States, any mixed-race person with “one drop” of “black
blood” would be assigned to the racial category of black.) Still, the technology itself
contains the possibility of reracializing human biology, even as it may seem to offer the
possibility of deracializing subjects by yielding segmented “admixed” heritage rather than
the all-or-nothing race categories inherent in models of hypodescent. As the geneticist
Rick Kittles (who self-identifies as African American) told me in a 2010 interview: “It’s
weird, because in a sense it’s like a circle. You can deconstruct race [with AIMs], but you
can also reconstruct race.”

THE CONTEMPORARY SYNTHESIS IN ACTION

From Teaching Tools to Modern-Day Phrenology

In 2004 I went to Pennsylvania State University to learn more about AIMs from the
physical anthropologist and population geneticist Mark Shriver. Shriver compiled one of
the initial marker panels that I witnessed others using in 2003 in medical genetics labs at
UC San Francisco. He has collaborated with others in my study at UCSF—specifically
with a team of Hispanic physician-researchers who use AIMs with the hope of ascertain-
ing health disparities in Puerto Ricans and Mexicans with asthma.16 He has also collab-
orated with Rick Kittles on various projects involving the use of African-American,
Caribbean, and African samples to investigate health disparities in cancer rates.
During my first few days at Penn State Shriver asked me if I would consider giving him
a DNA sample and allow him to take my photograph for a project he was working on. He
described the project as a collaboration with a company he consulted for, called DNAPrint
Genomics. One of the technologies he and DNAPrint were attempting to bring to market
had as its goal to assess a given person’s AIMs-deduced continental ancestry and, from
that, to allow scientists to infer a subject’s facial phenotypes based on his or her DNA
ancestry results for a large marker panel and a series of facial features derived from stored

15 See Rick Kittles and Kenneth Weiss, “Race, Ancestry, and Genes: Implications for Defining Disease Risk,”

Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, 2003, 4:33– 67. See also Joan Fujimura and Ramya
Rajagopalan, “Different Differences: The Use of ‘Genetic Ancestry’ versus Race in Biomedical Human Genetic
Research,” Soc. Stud. Sci., 2011, 41:5–30; and Sarah E. Ali-Khan, Tomasz Krakowski, Rabia Tahir, and
Abdallah S. Daar, “The Use of Race, Ethnicity, and Ancestry in Human Genetic Research,” HUGO Journal,
2011, 5:47– 63.
16 Fullwiley, “The Biological Construction of Race” (cit. n. 8).
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test takers’ photographs—all of which would be correlated. Today this technology is S
called molecular photofitting. In the years since, Shriver has also included genes that are
actually involved in facial morphology, such as for collagen, while still relying on
correlations of ancestry markers that are not involved in facial morphology. The primary
application he imagines for molecular photofitting is in law enforcement. His hope is to
be able to create a composite sketch of any given person, based on specific configurations
of the panel of alleles that comprise AIMs. Today his tool purports to yield information
not only on facial features but also on head morphology, hair texture, skin color, and
specific body phenotypes that are analyzed in conjunction with Ancestry Informative
Markers. It is now offered through a company called Parabon Snapshot™, which listed
Shriver as a collaborator in early 2014. The company website banner reads: “By mining
and modeling the human genome for associations with forensically relevant phenotypes,
we produce descriptive profiles of individuals from raw DNA samples.” Its “DNA
Snapshot Phenotyping Service” promises “to predict face morphology and coupl[e] it with
other related trait predictions, giving Snapshot the ability to produce a ‘digital mugshot’
of an individual corresponding to a given DNA sample.”17 (See Figure 1.)
After I declined Shriver’s invitation to join his database, I learned from other research-
ers in the lab that the bulk of the faces and correlative DNA that made up the project at
the time came from local Penn State study subjects—that is, from undergraduate students.
The undergraduates had consented within the context of a large survey class called
“Sociology 119: Race and Ethnic Relations,” taught by the sociologist Samuel Richards.
At the time, the course averaged five hundred students each semester. In a New York Times
article published on Shriver and Richards’s collaboration, Richards is quoted as saying,
“When I teach I try to demonstrate to students how complex race and ethnicity are.” He
followed up with: “My secondary goal is to improve race relations, and when people
discover that what they thought about themselves is not true—‘I thought I was Black, but
I’m also Asian and White’—it leads them to have a different kind of conversation about
race. It leads them to be less bigoted, to ask the deeper questions, to be more open to
differences.”18 Shriver’s AIMs are interpreted here as a way to make people see that it is
possible to have a bit of unexpected racial continental ancestry that challenges an
individual’s phenotypic race and personal identity. In the classroom and in many societal
settings where people are taking some version of AIMs for “fun” as a direct-to-consumer
ancestry test (sold under the name AncestrybyDNA), the idea is that AIMs deconstruct
race. This is the case even given that the technology fundamentally relies on putatively
pure populations in the past and, spatially, on what is seen as a static Old World. Yet in
other ventures, specifically for his patent application for forensic uses of AIMs, Shriver
plainly states that bio-geographical ancestry “is the biological component of race.”19
Period. Here, the target user within law enforcement is not imagined to share the same
feel-good ethic of dissolving racial boundaries as the Penn State students. Instead, a

17 See http://www.parabon-nanolabs.com/nanolabs/dna-forensics/ (accessed 1 Mar. 2014).

18 Emma Daily, “DNA Tells Students They Aren’t Who They Thought,” New York Times, 13 Apr. 2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/13/nyregion/13penn.html (accessed 2 Feb. 2014).
19 In November 2004 Shriver filed a patent application for AIMs, along with collaborator Tony Frudakis of the

now-defunct DNAPrint Genomics. There they write: “AIMs [are] a method of inferring, with a predetermined
level of confidence, Biogeographical ancestry, or BGA . . . which is the heritable component of ‘race.’” The
patent application goes on to say that AIMs can detect “race” at several levels: first, they can distinguish
Europeans from others, and, second, with a “finer” resolution, they can separate DNA into Indo-European,
African, Asian, and Native American. See Frudakis and Shriver, “Compositions and Methods for Inferring
Ancestry” (cit. n. 3), p. 7.
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Figure 1. A sample Snapshot report that combines several trait predictions into a unified “digital
mugshot.” Image courtesy of Parabon NanoLabs, Inc. In the late spring of 2014, Parabon revamped
its website with new images and more information about the precision of estimating and also
excluding certain phenotypes. The text that precedes this image confidently reads: “When CODIS
fails to find a match . . . Send us a human DNA sample and we will produce a forensic profile
containing predictions about the physical traits of its source, which can be used to generate new
investigative leads.” See http://www.parabon-nanolabs.com/nanolabs/dna-forensics/ (accessed 1
June 2014).
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precise racial description for the “digital mugshot” is the goal. What is perhaps more S
troubling is that the National Institute of Justice has funded Shriver to study molecular
photofitting exclusively in black populations, such as African Americans.20 Shriver
told me that this was due to African genetic diversity and the possibilities it offers
for learning about other groups down the line. When I reminded him about unfair
sentencing and racial profiling of black people in the United States, he simply said, “If
people don’t commit crimes, then they should not have to worry about being under
police surveillance.” When I asked why he was doing this work, he said, “I just want
to get the bad guys. In fact, this should be seen as helping the black community, since
most crime that happens there is black on black crime. So hopefully this will actually
make black people safer.”

Contemporary “Uplift”: DNA Summer Camp for African-American Teens

Farther beyond the confines of Shriver’s lab, a team of geneticists, humanists, and social
scientists proposes to use his technology to give ancestry genetic tests to students in public
schools that have large minority populations. They specifically hope to target African-
American middle-school children through a summer camp curriculum, stating that this
group feels that evolutionary theories send the message that they are “less evolved.”
Funded by several private and public universities and the National Science Foundation,
the effort is called “Using Genetics and Genealogy to Teach Evolution and Human
Diversity” and is housed at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent). The
project has been consistently led by the Penn State physical anthropologists Nina Jablon-
ski and Mark Shriver, and several other scholars have rotated in and out as co–principal
investigators since 2012. In the project description for the teens, Jablonski, Shriver, and
their colleagues write: “The unique aspect of this curriculum is that it will involve the
parallel investigation of individual genealogy from historical records, personal histories,
and DNA markers. Starting with the ‘study of me,’ students will be introduced to the
principles of inheritance, modern genetics, and the evolutionary process.”21
The first proposal was inspired by the African-American Studies scholar Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., who “in his widely televised documentaries about the heritage of famous
African Americans . . . demonstrated the power and educational efficacy of multidisci-
plinary explorations of personal ancestry.”22 Jablonski approached Gates with the idea (he
had already collaborated with Shriver for his PBS series African American Lives, which
aired in 2006).
Gates emphasizes in his films that ancestry testing is a way to restore history lost to
African Americans when the paper trail of traditional genealogy hits a dead end. The last
episode of the first series of African American Lives focused largely on DNA tests,
including AIMs “admixture” analyses. In this segment Gates’s guests all learned that they
were some combination of “African,” “European,” and, to a lesser degree, “East Asian”
and “Native American.” The ancestry information was delivered in exact percentage
terms. In one scene Gates and Shriver sit in front of a computer monitor while a photo of
Gates’s head and face floats in 3-D. A new image then appears of different human faces
from the various “races of man”— but it starts with an ape. Skulls of different shapes are

20 See P. Claes, D. K. Liberton, K. Daniels, K. M. Rosana, E. E. Quillen, et al., “Modeling 3D Facial Shape

from DNA,” PLoS Genetics, 2014, 10(3):e1004224.

21 See http://www.nescent.org/science/awards_summary.php?id⫽369 (accessed 2 Feb. 2014).
22 See https://www.nescent.org/cal/calendar_detail.php?id⫽856 (accessed 2 Feb. 2014).
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sketched directly above the head of each caricature. Gates then narrates for the viewer
through voiceover: Shriver “is currently exploring the relationship between [genetic]
admixture and our physical features. Now this may sound a lot like the old idea that our
hair, our eyes, and our skin color suggest that different groups of people evolved
separately, and that some people are physically and intellectually superior to other people,
but Dr. Shriver is quick to refute this.” The film then cuts to Shriver giving a lecture to
his Penn State students, with Gates sitting among them. Shriver, who identifies as white,
shares that his own “racial” admixture is 11 percent African. Gates, in his usual jocular
fashion, then raises his hand to ask Shriver how his mother took the news. This scene
suggests that Shriver’s “refutation” of the old racial thinking happens simply because he
shares DNA with present-day Africans. The idea is that “race” as genetic ancestry allows
for sharing and inclusion as sources of belonging— but also of entertainment. On the
surface, this possibility quickly trumps the serious violence of hierarchical exclusion and
racial hatred of the past. This program of African American Lives, as well as African
American Lives 2, aired during February for Black History Month.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Race thinking in science is still with us today, despite a few brief retreats as recently as the year
2000. Increasingly, the use of race in certain geneticists’ circles can be seen as acceptable on
several registers. Scientists who organize studies by race, even if they prefer the euphemism
“continental genetic ancestry,” now hope to include racial minorities in projects with social
justice and real capital effects.23 There is a movement where policy makers and scientists who
could be classed as political liberals and conservatives come together and join forces to
advocate for the inclusion of race as a variable in genetic studies. Still, the organization of
protocols by race too often reduces biological outcomes that have social origins to genetic
explanations.24 This dynamic has a power effect that makes it harder to pinpoint where the
pernicious aspect of race in science starts or stops. In the present, the potential for racism is
often embedded in good intentions. For instance, in the early 2000s proponents of racially
tailored pharmaceuticals framed them as at last offering needed medical attention to histori-
cally abused and neglected groups. They even borrowed from humanitarian discourses of
service delivery to the poor.25 The gross simplification of human population and individual
origins by direct-to-consumer ancestry testing companies shows how profit is joined with
scientists’ projects to somehow restore to people the histories lost to them through slavery and
other forms of dispossession. Massive recruitment of minorities into genetic databases is
framed as the claim that “they too” need to be counted in the genetic revolution.26 Teaching

23 One clear example is the direct-to-consumer genetic testing company 23&Me’s “Roots into the Future”

project. For an analysis see Sandra Lee, “Race, Risk, and Recreation in Personal Genomics: The Limits of Play,”
Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 2013, 27:550 –569.
24 See Jonathan Kahn’s discussion of the first racialized pharmaceutical, BiDil, in Race in a Bottle (New York:

Columbia Univ. Press, 2012). See also Duana Fullwiley, “The Molecularization of Race and Institutions of
Difference: Pharmacy and Public Science after the Genome,” in Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age, ed. B. A.
Koenig, S. S. Lee, and S. Richardson (Studies in Medical Anthropology) (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ.
Press, 2008), pp. 149 –171; Fullwiley, “Biologistical Construction of Race” (cit. n. 8); and Dorothy Roberts,
Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (New
York: New Press, 2012).
25 See Kahn, Race in a Bottle, p. 98, where proponents of BiDil likened African-American heart failure to an

“orphan” disease in order to frame its FDA approval as ethically and politically necessary.
26 Bustamante et al., “Genomics for the World” (cit. n. 5).
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tools to drive home multicultural societal acceptance of difference have also provided the S
genetic materials to build databases that will assist in forensic racial profiling of DNA left at
crime scenes. Because of extant, well-documented racial bias throughout the criminal justice
system, we should be concerned that molecular photofitting is now being developed largely
with black people’s samples.
Until early in 2014, less conspicuous were projects that overtly “rank human
groups, and . . . measure them negatively against an idealised, romanticized picture”
of Europeans outlined by Stepan.27 In May 2014, however, Nicholas Wade, the
recently retired senior science writer for the New York Times, published A Trouble-
some Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History. In it he makes the case that
Western culture and so, by extension, people of European descent are better adapted,
or more “evolved,” than others, especially Africans. His racial hierarchy is bolstered
by economic examples in which poverty can only mean maladapted genes. Wade
nearly always puts the world’s black people at the bottom of the hierarchy, writing:
“Many countries with no resources, like Japan or Singapore, are very rich, while richly
endowed countries like Nigeria tend to be quite poor. Iceland, covered mostly in
glaciers and frigid deserts, might seem less favorably situated than Haiti, but Iceland-
ers are wealthy and Haitians are beset by persistent poverty and corruption.” Although
Wade admits that much of the book is “speculative,” the first part builds its case by
reviewing current genomic studies in which population differences are framed in
continental racial terms through technologies like AIMs. Wade writes: “Analysis of
genomes from around the world establishes that there is indeed a biological reality to
race . . . an illustration of the point is the fact that with mixed-race populations, such
as African Americans, geneticists can now track along an individual’s genome and
assign each segment to an African or European ancestor, an exercise that would be
impossible if race did not have some basis in biological reality.”28 He also cites
forensic efforts based on AIMs technology (and digital mugshots) to determine a
suspect’s race with “80 percent accuracy” as proof that genetic races exist. Within two
weeks of its publication date the book was supported by a flurry of reviews, starting
with a prepublication review by Charles Murray, coauthor of The Bell Curve, in the
Wall Street Journal. Prepublication critiques began with a Webinar hosted by the
anthropologist Augustı́n Fuentes and the American Anthropological Association.
This is the contemporary moment. Scholars of race in science must detail it
meticulously in order to begin to chronicle the continuities that allow for so much
active change that has ushered in a progressive, renewed acceptance of biological
ideas of race that are often deployed for antiracist efforts. At the same time, works like
Wade’s have reinvigorated quite racist assumptions about human capacities. Yet here,
too, the prominent science reporter is desperate to come off as a reasoned nonracist,
while many of the bloggers, journalists, and scientists who wrote the initial flood of
positive reviews supporting him have branded themselves not as racist but as con-
cerned with “Human Biodiversity.” (They call their community affiliation “HBD.”)29
In this cultural landscape where we now find ourselves, the complex realities of
human population differences are too easily conceptually synthesized with genetically

27 Stepan, Idea of Race in Science (cit. n. 1), p. 189.

28 Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History (New York: Penguin, 2014),
pp. 13, 4.
29 See Nathanial Comfort, “Genetics under the Skin,” Nature, 2014, 513:306 –307.
814 FOCUS—ISIS, 105 : 4 (2014)

based notions of race— despite new advances in genomics. These ideas are finding
appeal with people regardless of where they sit on the political spectrum. As such, an
acceptance of race as genetic is becoming ever more entrenched in medicine, law,
science education, genomic research, and personal identity. At the same time, it is
potentially reconfiguring notions of racial justice and political inclusion—as well as
exclusion—more broadly.