Governmental budget systems do not only allocate public resources, they also influence the way in which people interact with their government and conceive of their role as citizens. The contemporary politics of budget making tends to mask this influence. As originally conceived, however, public...

This article urges a cautious approach to assessing the promises of synthetic biology based on broad political and economic concerns rather than technical ones. Specifically, I mark three related dynamics which place the current buzz around synthetic biology in a broader context. These dynamics...

As genetic databases continue to yield new insights and inventions, the commercial incentive to conflate race and genetics may be hard to resist. This article discusses the move to use race as a genetic category to obtain patent protection and drug approval. The article does not attempt to...

Drugmakers are eager to develop medicines targeted at ethnic groups, but so far they have made poor choices based on unsound science. This article focuses on the drug, BiDil – a drug that combats congestive heart failure by dilating the arteries and veins of African American patients. The...

This article explores the strategic use of race as a genetic category to obtain patent protection and drug approval in biotechnology research and product development. The author explores how this inclusion could have social and scientific implications. The author takes the reader through the...

A wide array of federal mandates have a profound impact on the use of racial and ethnic categories in biomedical research, clinical practice, product development, and health policy. Current discussions over the appropriate use of racial and ethnic categories in biomedical contexts have largely...

This article endeavors to place into context recent developments surrounding the United States Food and Drug Administration recent approval of BiDil (isosorbide dintrate/hydralazine hydrochloride) (NitroMed, Inc., Lexington, MA) as the first ever race-specific drug – in this case to treat...

The claim that blacks die from heart failure at a rate twice that of whites is informing efforts to develop and market the drug BiDil, which( at the time this article was written) was undergoing clinical trials to be approved by the FDA as the first drug ever specified to treat African Americans...

As the United States is poised to enter a new era of nuclear power plant construction, it behooves us to revisit some of the controversies of the past and consider how best to deal with some of the major problems that arose once before and may confront us once again as we go down this path. A...

A White man in Washington State tries to use the results of his DNA ancestry test to claim access to minority set-aside contracts. A conservative federal Circuit Court judge in Texas invokes the work of an anti-racist evolutionary biologist to argue that since race is not genetic then racial...