Recruitment & The Lab
True or False: When fieldworkers recruit people for diabetes studies on the border, they mostly use everyday social labels like "Mexican American" rather than strict genetic tests.
What is True?
True or False: The genetic studies in Chapter 5 heavily included local border poverty and low wages as primary variables in their DNA databases.
What is False?
Anthropologists and social scientists widely agree that "race" is not a fixed biological category, but this type of human construct.
What is a social (or cultural/historical) construct?
People on the border often donate blood samples to help their community or families. But once the blood reaches global research labs, this key part of the donor's life gets completely removed from the data.
What is their social/living conditions (or their environment/history)?
Name TWO everyday social or environmental factors on the U.S.–Mexico border that impact someone's health, but are ignored when looking only at DNA.
What are diet/food access, job stress, poverty, pollution, or lack of healthcare?
Why might a community feel betrayed if they donate blood to help cure diabetes, but the resulting scientific paper only talks about their "genetics" without fixing local healthcare?
What is because their real living conditions/needs were ignored while their data was used?
Once human blood samples are turned into anonymous scientific data and shared between global labs, the DNA essentially becomes this economic term for a tradeable good.
What is a commodity (or product/asset)?
If researchers recruit people based on their social ethnic group, but only look at DNA for answers, what dangerous assumption might people make about why that ethnic group gets sick?
What is assuming the disease is purely genetic/in their blood (or blaming genetics instead of poverty/environment)?
What is ONE way health researchers could study health issues in a community without treating the residents merely as data sources?
What is providing direct medical care, addressing social conditions, or partnering with the community?