Will ignoring race impede progress in medicine, or is it a scientifically specious notion?“A view widespread among many social scientists, endorsed in official statements by the American Sociological Association and the American Anthropological Association, is that race is not a valid biological concept. But biologists, particularly the population geneticists who study genetic variation, have found that there is a structure in the human population. The structure is a family tree showing separate branches for Africans, Caucasians (Europe, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent), East Asians, Pacific Islanders and American Indians.

Biologists, too, have often been reluctant to use the term “race.” But this taboo was broken last year by Dr. Neil Risch, a leading population geneticist at Stanford University.

Vexed by an editorial in The New England Journal that declared that race was “biologically meaningless,” Dr. Risch argued in the electronic journal Genome Biology that self-identified race was useful in understanding ethnic differences in disease and in the response to drugs.

Race corresponded broadly to continental ancestry and hence to the branches on the human family tree described by geneticists, he said.” NY Times