The director of a DNA harvesting scheme created under President Barack Obama has confessed that the initiative aims to “overrepresent” ethnic minorities. Announced in Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) All of Us program seeks to build a “diverse” database of at least 1 million Americans. The program has collected more than 560,000 DNA samples, almost half of which were taken from participants identifying as an ethnic or racial minority.
“We are actually looking to overrepresent” minorities, said Martin Mendoza, director of health equity for All of Us.
Ethnic minority participation in biomedical research has historically been low. Reports The Washington Post: “Since the completion more than 20 years ago of the Human Genome Project, which mapped most human genes for the first time, nearly 90 percent of genomics studies have been conducted using DNA from participants of European descent, research shows.”
This, the Post claims, can have real-world consequences. “A few years ago, researchers found that some Black patients had been misdiagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy because they’d tested positive for genetic variants that were thought to be harmful. But it turns out the variants, more common among Black Americans than among White Americans, are likely harmless.”
However, while striving to achieve proportional representation of ethnic minorities in medical research may be a worthy and worthwhile endeavor, critics will contend that the overrepresentation of ethnic minorities in such efforts could also be harmful to medical research.
