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Joint Book Review: Jonathan Kahn, Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age and Anne Pollock, Medicating Race: Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference

Racial classifications form a long-standing and contentious area of interest in the social sciences, particularly where racial difference is linked to socio-economic disparity. As part of this interest, social scientists have convincingly shown the very category of race to be the outcome of social stratification processes rather than an actual, essential characteristic of human beings. In recent years, this perspective has also gained traction in other fields, most notably biology, where the existence of discrete races is now considered to be a fiction, due to the predominant genetic similarity of all human beings. It is therefore an important and, considering the issues of social justice associated with race, alarming observation that racial thought continues to be highly prevalent in medicine. Moreover, a paradoxical development is that racial classification appears to be expanding in the context of genomics, which was believed to be the very field that made race obsolete in biological terms. Concerns with race and social justice that have occupied social scientists for decades, thus increasingly play out in the domain of the life sciences and medicine. Books like the ones discussed here draw our attention to these important developments. Jonathan Kahn, a legal scholar at Hamline School of Law, explicitly engages with an emerging understanding of race as a genetic category. He takes the drug BiDil – intended to treat heart failure in ‘self-identified’ black patients – as an entry point for investigating the relations between race and pharmaceuticals, produced in regulatory and commercial arenas. In his analysis of the BiDil controversy (in which Kahn himself figured by arguing against race-specific approval for the drug in a testimony to the Food and Drug Administration [FDA]), he stages three main protagonists: mandates from the US federal government to enhance diversity in biomedical research; a patent system actively stimulating expanded use of racial categories in applications for intellectual property protection; and drug companies eager to use this regulatory leeway around race to create new 500100 SOC47510.1177/0038038513500100SociologyJoint Book Review 2013