인종과 유전: 게놈 시대에 은폐된 인종의 자리

Race and Genetics: The Concealed Location of Race in a Genomic Age

This essay concerns itself with the insidious return of race in the post-racial era of America. Perhaps most insidious is the way in which the vestigial remains of race come back in the field of health and medicine after the Human Genome Project is completed. Ironically, by redefining race as a biological category written in the genome, biotechnologies have undermined not only the scientific manifesto that human beings are 99.9 percent the same but also a hopeful anticipation that race may not be identified in our genes. Given such circumstances, I attempt to investigate how race is reappropriated in genetics, pharmacogenomics, and DNA-related biotechnology. For this purpose, I look carefully into the birth of BiDil which was approved as the first “race-specific” drug by the FDA in 2005. Conceding that BiDil was legally and commercially constructed as a “race-specific” drug, I come up with the three reasons of why BiDil did not end up in a total fiasco. Then drawing on Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of noso-politics and bio-politics, I elaborate on the discourse of race and public health, which should be reconfigurated in the context of biocitizenship.