Uc Science Today

Racial issues have been widely discussed by sociologists, anthropologists, artists and filmmakers. Now, medical researchers are chiming in with their expertise. "We’re thinking about race in terms of self-identified race and ethnicity, a very specific measure in the context of biomedical research. And we’re the first group that’s looked at genome-wide molecular signature of race and ethnicity and shown that it differs not for just genetic reasons, but also probably for environmental reasons." That’s Noah Zaitlen, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He came to this conclusion with his colleagues while studying asthma rates in different ethnic groups. "It’s very high in Puerto Ricans. It’s high in African-Americans. It’s very low in Mexicans." So Zaitlen wanted to know why. He says if doctors looked not only at these groups’ genetics, but also at the communities they live in and the air that they breathe, they might have improved their diagnosis and treatments.