Sunday, July 29, 2007

3 Comments:

My comment was a little long, so I decided to expand it into a blog post, but to summarize, I respectfully disagree with the opinion in that Scientific American article. I don't think the trend of targeting drugs to certain races or ethnicities is a bad thing, mainly because I don't believe it will be economically deleterious to either patients or to drug companies, and I think using race (or at least ethnicity) as a surrogate for genetic polymorphisms that effect drug response is better than not doing so. I think such diagnosis would be useful in the same way as age or sex are used as rough markers of real biological age or hormonal levels and developmental history. There are real race-based biological differences in human populations, and ignoring that would be for the worse, I think.

I found this paper by Risch et al. to be very good.

By  such.ire, at 1:22 AM  

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By  Unknown, at 3:15 PM  

Given the sad state of Scientific American under its present management, I think I find the position taken by Risch, et. al., to be more persuasive.

Consider that SciAm has waged a jihad against any doubters of the current consensus on causes of global warming, and the disgraceful editorial attacks on Bjorn Lomborg, which completely failed to address the data he presented, and you have to take SciAm with a grain of salt these days.

By  Anonymous, at 9:52 PM  

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