In 2000, with the success of the Human Genome Project, scientists declared the death of race in biology and medicine. But within five years, many of these same scientists had reversed course and embarked upon a new hunt for the biological meaning of race. Drawing on personal interviews and life stories, Race Decoded takes us into the world of elite genome scientists-including Francis Collins, director of the NIH; Craig Venter, the first person to create a synthetic genome; and Spencer Wells, National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence, among others-to show how and why they are formulating new ways of thinking about race. In this original exploration, Catherine Bliss reveals a paradigm shift, both at the level of science and society, from colorblindness to racial consciousness. Scientists have been fighting older understandings of race in biology while simultaneously promoting a new grand-scale program of minority inclusion. In selecting research topics or considering research design, scientists routinely draw upon personal experience of race to push the public to think about race as a biosocial entity, and even those of the most privileged racial and social backgrounds incorporate identity politics in the scientific process. Though individual scientists may view their positions differently-whether as a black civil rights activist or a white bench scientist-all stakeholders in the scientific debates are drawing on memories of racial discrimination to fashion a science-based activism to fight for social justice.
"The ongoing debates about the role of race in biology, genetics, and clinical medicine have often produced more heat than light. Catherine Bliss takes us on a journey that is bound to illuminate an important and relatively unexplored feature of this phenomenon-the ways in which leading scientists in these fields compare in their thinking about (and use of) the concepts of race and ethnicity."
New York University
"Catherine Bliss's Social by Nature is critical to understanding the social dangers of over-interpreting genomic data."
J. Craig Venter Institute
"In a well-researched, fascinating, and meticulous study, Catherin Bliss unravels the motivations that genetic scientists bring to their work, and how these motivations caused them to return to considerations of race . . . Race Decoded is an important contribution to the scholarship on science and race as it treats geneticists as complex social actors, and in doing so complicates narratives regard
