An early racial slight

Scientists say that race is a meaningless concept; in that it does not explain anything in particular. The BBC headline for a news item published on 29 February 2008 though read ‘Race differences in immune genes’. If race is not meaningful a concept then what is this about racially based differences in immunity?

Either race is meaningless or it is not. So what is going on here? This is the issue; human beings vary as you can tell by just looking at how unique each one of us is. Percentage-wise differences are coded by anywhere between 0.01 to 2 per cent of the human genome. The differences include visible characteristics like colour or non-visible ones like blood type.

Differences are why we are here today. In my first demography lectures I used to give to sociology students at the University of Cape Town, I used vulnerability to smallpox or other infectious diseases as an example of selective mortality. If our ancestors had the same vulnerability to smallpox, they we all would have perished and left our species extinct.

The BBC news item refers to fascinating research done by Eileen Dolan and her team at the University of Chicago. ‘We want to understand’ she says ‘why different populations experience different degrees of toxicity when taking certain drugs’. As clinicians and population geneticists know, this is a fair, compelling question, to ask.

The Dolan team looked at over 9,000 genes (we have a total of about 26,000) in 180 people, half of them ‘Caucasian’ (their word, which refers to a region of the world the Caucuses) and the other half Nigerian (referring to a nation-state). Comparing a region with a nation-state appears to be inconsistent, incomparable, units.

The word ‘Caucasian’ is associated with the idea of a racial type. As a word it has lost its neutral geographical reference in human evolution studies and, as a result of the pseudo-science of 19th century palaeontology, become a bit of a swearword in public discourse. Scientists use it because there is no alternative nomenclature.

For example, the category ‘white’ is inadequate and misleading. No person, except for the most severely afflicted individuals suffering from albinism, is white, devoid of colour. How silly white as a term is was illustrated by the results of the Living History Project, an initiative of the Africa Genome Education Institute and Ancestry24.com.

There is the story of Beryl Eichenberger, whom we tested for ancestral origins. She is a descendent from the clan of Katrine from whom 10 per cent of continental Europeans descended. Katrine lived around 16,000 years ago in the wooded plains of northeast Italy, now flooded by the Adriatic Sea, and in the southern foothills of the Alps.

There is the story of Sue Murray. She comes from the clan of Ursula, one of the seven oldest populations founded in Europe 45,000 to 50,000 years ago. Murray is likely associated with a sub-group of Persian-Iranian descent, people who inhabited the southern mid Eurasian area of Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent.

Fair in skin colour, Eichenberger has a maternal Mediterranean origin and Murray a north Middle-Eastern one. They are not strictly speaking of Caucasian origin. Eichenberger has a case for being European but Murray would be a stretch, as she maternally is likely Persian. These are, for now, broad categories. We will soon master the ability to link DNA to village.

The monumental importance of ancestral geography has to do with the fact that human beings have come to vary because we reproduced in ecologies that varied by, amongst others, in the infectious diseases that happened to be around. Those of our ancestors who survived the bugs just by sheer accident must have had some immunity against them, as this well before the age of medicine.

Think about haemoglobin S and immunity against malaria. Then there is CCR5 and immunity against smallpox, bubonic plague and HIV amongst people of the Northern Europe. The Chicago Dolan team established that which we long suspected, which is that antibody production to combat infectious varied between you and I.

Does the variation follow so-called racial or colour lines? No it does not. Does it follow geographically defined lines of reproducing ancestral populations? Yes it does. So what with the race headline? Probably the sub-editor who had to find 5-6 words for the headline. Race is so easy and so terribly misleading and it is time the media caught with modern science.