Jonah - Summaries and Division Concept in "The Meanin of 'Race'..."

To Know Where He Lies:  After the Bosnian war that took place 1992-1995, Europe's worst atrocity since World War II was revealed: the discovery of unmarked mass graves representing the victims of the genocide in Srebrenica, a UN "safe area". The innovative genetic technology developed to identify the eight thousand Muslim Bosnian men and boys who were located in these mass graves as well as others around Srebrenica is the focus for the rest of the book.  The cross-section of scientific technologies, memory, and the imagination is an interesting thematic underlay for the book as a whole.  The cross-section that is revealed is a unique creation of the environment surrounding body recovery from mass genocide.  Technology is shown to be intertwined in many aspects of postwar Bosnian society,  all in all developing an idea around the absence of so many people and its effects on the surrounding divided community.

The Science and Business of Genetic Ancestry Testing: This article explores the implications of genetic testing and the impacts it can have on many people’s lives.  In addition, exploration into the limitations of these tests warrant skepticism among those who pay or such tests.  Scientifically speaking, there are shortcomings to the type of information able to be extracted from one’s DNA, whether only a percentage of the DNA is analyzed or a more thorough test is conducted.  These limitations make them less informative than a lot of the test-takers realize, which seems to come as a warning against putting a lot of emotional backing to the revelation of the results.  Lastly, the article concludes with the commercialization of such testing, and how this act has furthered such hidden misconceptions about the inaccuracy and relative significance of the tests.

The Meaning of “Race” in the New Genomics:  The central challenges tackled in the article are the extent to which health disparities result from unequal resource distribution and consequently the varied socioeconomic statuses of individuals.  In addition, the article explores the inequalities in status of health in relation to inherent characteristics of individuals defined as ethnically different.  The consequences of such a discussion implies certain moral and social parameters on the inherent existence of race in our society, though much of newer studies attempt to eliminate difference between racial categories.  I found very fitting this quote as a distinct clarification of the racial disparities and how to properly acknowledge the disparity’s socioeconomic and historic roots: “it is critical to distinguish between biological and sociocultural contributions to the increased morbidity, mortality, and truncated access to services experienced by minority populations and the poor.”  Ignoring such a difference, as the authors explain, can reinforce the racialization of diseases and lead toward a further stereotype, most likely negative as it revolves around poor health, that comes from an increased knowledge in genome analysis and disease susceptibility sciences.  The concept in all 3 articles most interesting to me is this very clear, and yet so often ignored, distinction in the roots of racial differences related to health.  Without such a division in analyzing the roots of health disparities, racism seems to only be pushed more in such identifications of racially uneven disease statistics.