Editing Race (human categorization) (section)

=== Biomedicine ===
{{Main|Race and health}}
{{See also|Pharmacogenomics}}
In the United States, federal government policy promotes the use of racially categorized data to identify and address health disparities between racial or ethnic groups.<ref name="hhs" /> In clinical settings, race has sometimes been considered in the diagnosis and treatment of medical conditions. Doctors have noted that some medical conditions are more prevalent in certain racial or ethnic groups than in others, without being sure of the cause of those differences. Recent interest in [[race-based medicine]], or race-targeted [[pharmacogenomics]], has been fueled by the proliferation of human genetic data which followed the [[Human Genome Project|decoding]] of the [[human genome]] in the first decade of the twenty-first century. There is an active debate among biomedical researchers about the meaning and importance of race in their research. Proponents of the use of racial categories in biomedicine argue that continued use of racial categorizations in biomedical research and clinical practice makes possible the application of new genetic findings, and provides a clue to diagnosis.<ref name="Risch 2002" /><ref name="Condit, et al. 2003" /> Biomedical researchers' positions on race fall into two main camps: those who consider the concept of race to have no biological basis and those who consider it to have the potential to be biologically meaningful. Members of the latter camp often base their arguments around the potential to create genome-based [[personalized medicine]].<ref>{{cite journal |last=Lee |first=Catherine |title='Race' and 'ethnicity' in biomedical research: How do scientists construct and explain differences in health? |journal=[[Social Science & Medicine]] |date=March 2009 |volume=68 |issue=6 |pages=1183–1190 |doi=10.1016/j.socscimed.2008.12.036 |pmid=19185964}}</ref>

Other researchers point out that finding a difference in disease prevalence between two socially defined groups does not necessarily imply genetic causation of the difference.<ref name="Graves 2011" /><ref name="Fullwiley2011DNA" /> They suggest that medical practices should maintain their focus on the individual rather than an individual's membership to any group.<ref name="Harpending2006AnthropologicalGenetics" /> They argue that overemphasizing genetic contributions to health disparities carries various risks such as reinforcing stereotypes, promoting racism or ignoring the contribution of non-genetic factors to health disparities.<ref name="Lee, Mountain, et al." /> International epidemiological data show that living conditions rather than race make the biggest difference in health outcomes even for diseases that have "race-specific" treatments.<ref name="Kahn 2011" /> Some studies have found that patients are reluctant to accept racial categorization in medical practice.<ref name="Condit, et al. 2003" />