Category Archives: race

On Nicholas Wade and the blurring of boundaries between science and fantasy

I just finished reading Nicholas Wade’s “A Troublesome Inheritance”, his latest effort to explain all of his personal racial prejudices in the light of recent human evolution. In this book he sets out to convince readers that many aspects of modern society – the English capacity for industrialization, Jewish intelligence, the inability to establish democratic […]

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The Immortal Consenting of Henrietta Lacks

Rebecca Skloot has an essay in today’s New York Times discussing the recent publication of the genome sequence of a widely used human cell line. Skloot, as most of you already know, wrote a book about the history this cell line  – known as HeLa for Henrietta Lacks, the woman from whom they were obtained. In […]

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The destructive myopia of the NIH study on grant funding and race

Last week Science published a paper describing the results of an NIH-sponsored investigation into the impact of a scientist’s race on the probability of that their grants will be funded. The findings were striking: After controlling for the applicant’s educational background, country of origin, training, previous research awards, publication record, and employer characteristics, we find […]

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