Who are we?: The human genome project, race and ethnicity.

• Author: Callister, Paul
• Position: Report

Abstract

Race and ethnicity continue to be evolving concepts. They are influenced by genetic research but are also shaped by discussion and debate that takes place far from laboratories. Their meanings also evolve somewhat differently in local contexts. One of the newer influences on these concepts are the findings from the ongoing Human Genome Project. This project, as well as other genetic research, is already playing a part in the ongoing evolution of ideas of who we are, both individually and collectively. However, a range of factors, including the significant intermixing of people across various boundaries, suggest that personal definitions of identity are likely to become more important than "scientific" definitions imposed by external authorities.

INTRODUCTION

In 2008 Statistics New Zealand commissioned a literature review based on the broad question "Who are we?" (Callister et al. 2009). Topics explored in this review included ethnogenesis; the official construction of ethnicity in New Zealand; ethnic intermarriage, and related to this the transmission of ethnicity to children and multiple ethnicity; ethnic mobility; indigeneity; the recent growth of "New Zealander" responses in the New Zealand census; and genetics, the Human Genome project, race and ethnicity.

Ethnic mobility, the New Zealander response and one aspect of indigeneity--being part of an iwi (tribe)--are explored in some depth in this Social Policy Journal collection. Some issues of intermarriage, multiple ethnicity and social policy have already been explored in this journal (Callister 2004, Keddell 2007). In this paper we have chosen to expand on the outcomes of the literature review in just one area: the Human Genome Project, race and ethnicity. We have chosen this topic for a number of reasons.

First, although New Zealand official statistics have shifted to a self-defined and, in theory, culturally constructed, definition of ethnicity, it is possible that clearly bounded "racial groups" remain in the minds of many New Zealanders, especially when categorising people other than themselves. (2) Certainly the term "race" is still used at times in public debates; for example, regarding "race-based" social policies, there is a Race Relations Commissioner in the Human Rights Commission, and the Human Rights Commission supports a "Race Relations Day" each year (Callister 2007). Second, particularly in the U.S. there is an important public policy-related debate about whether "race" is a useful variable in both health research and in medicine. In addition, although New Zealand policy research focuses on the ethnicity variable, in areas such as ethnicity-based scholarships or law and medical school quotas, ancestry rather than ethnicity is generally the way to determine eligibility (Callister 2007). Generally, ancestry is based on biological links. (3) Another reason is that, particularly in the U.S. context, genetic testing has become part of genealogy research. Finally, of the six current official level 1 groupings of ethnicity in New Zealand, the four that are used mainly in public policy analysis (i.e. European, Maori, Pacific peoples, and, in more recent times, Asian) have some links back to current continental-based "racial" groups which have limited historical validity. Although we are not directly focusing on issues of indigeneity in this paper, these issues are inevitably confronted when studying human genetics, as will be shown.

In this paper we initially contextualise the debates with a brief history of New Zealand migration. Then, under the broad heading of the Human Genome Project, race and ethnicity, we consider a number of issues. First, we briefly discuss some early "scientific" systems of classifying groups, then move on to current debates about classification. In this discussion we talk about cultural versus biological construction of race or ethnicity. We realise there are various meanings given to the term "cultural construction", but in this context we align with the view that official ethnic categories are being created through social processes, with historical, political and economic forces shaping the naming of groups. The alternative--but not mutually exclusive--view is that ethnic groups form naturally around people with shared characteristics and that these are then recognised in official data collections. We then explore recent discussion about genes, ethnicity and health in New Zealand. This is followed by a section on genes and popular science, particularly new and cheap methods of DNA testing that allow us to determine some ancestry. We then consider wider issues of genetics and where we come from. This leads on to some final comments on a topic for which, due to the advances always being made in scientific understanding, it is very difficult to draw clear conclusions.

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF NEW ZEALAND

The migration history of New Zealand influences local thinking about race, ethnicity and genetics. New Zealand has experienced a number of waves of migration. The first was by settlers from islands around the Marquesas and Cook Islands, starting perhaps about 1,000 years ago, who became New Zealand's indigenous population, the Maori. The first recorded European visit to New Zealand was by Abel Tasman in 1642. Over 100 years later James Cook arrived in 1769 from Britain. In contrast to Tasman, Cook and his crew had numerous contacts with Maori (Salmond 1991). From the earliest days of contact there has been a high level of intermarriage, both formal and informal, between Maori and the new arrivals (Pool 1991, Belich 1996).

When Cook arrived the ethnic composition was, by current definition, 100% Maori. Due to a number of factors, including exposure to introduced diseases such as measles, to which Maori had no natural resistance--a genetic influence--and land dispossession, it has been estimated that the Maori population subsequently halved by the late 1880s from its pre-contact population (Sorrenson 1956, King 2003). In the period of Maori population decline the settler population was rapidly increasing, from fewer than a thousand to half a million between 1831 and 1881 (Belich 1996: 278). Around the turn of the 20th century the Maori population began to increase again.

After World War II there was significant migration from the Pacific, with this population growing rapidly during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The fourth major group, classified as Asians, pre-dates recent Pacific migration. There have been people of Asian origins and ethnicities living in New Zealand from the early days of European settlement, although in very small numbers. Many of the "Europeans" were of course also of Asian origin, having moved on from countries such as India and Malaya. However, a century later in the 1980s and 1990s the number of people from Asia grew rapidly. A more recent component of migration comprises refugees and other settlers from Africa and the Middle East.

Although migration has long been important in New Zealand, strong migration flows in recent decades mean New Zealand, with just under a fifth of its population born overseas, is at the high end of industrialised countries in terms of the proportion of foreign-born residents. In addition, a similar proportion of the New Zealand-born population, including Maori, does not live in New Zealand (Hamer 2007).

THE HUMAN GENOME PROJECT, RACE AND ETHNICITY

The last great battle over racism will be fought not over access to a lunch counter, or a hotel room, or the right to vote, or even the right to occupy the White House: It will be fought in the laboratory, in a test tube, under a microscope, in our genome, on the battlefield of our DNA.

(Henry Louis Gates Jr, cited in Anthony 2008:36)

Since the early 20th century, a variety of scientists, educators, and public officials have trusted that growing knowledge of human biology would correct erroneous--and pernicious ideas about race. (Morning 2008:106)

In February 2001 the Human Genome Project, a U.S. federal government effort, together with Celera Genomics, a private company, successfully completed drafts of the entire human genome (genome 5). This project, and what has so far flowed from it, has created a new set of debates about possible links between genetics and human behaviour, particularly health outcomes. As part of this there has been much discussion in U.S. academic journals about whether the Human Genome Project supports concepts of race or undermines them. These writings can be found in the biological science journals (for example, there was a Nature Genetics supplement in November 2004 (4)) as well as in the area of social sciences (for example, the American Psychologist devoted its January 2005 edition to a discussion of "genes, race, and psychology in the genome era"). In 2008 a special edition of the American Journal of Sociology comprised a series of papers discussing how sociological thinking intersects with new advances coming out of genetic research. There has long been some tension between the "culturally constructed" view of identity favoured by most sociologists and that of "biologically determined" identity formation. These types of collections indicate that researchers are actively exploring these tensions. Writing in this sociological collection, Morning (2008:S108) argues that the type of research being undertaken in human genetics has recently shifted many people's assumptions about race "from a model based on phenotype to one grounded in genotype".

However, as Morning (2008) notes, the Human Genome Project is only one of a long line of scientific "advances" in thinking about race and ethnicity. Based on a survey of American textbooks, she argues that in the U.S. science has been continually used, and often misused, not only to rework concepts of race but also to preserve the idea of race and associated concepts of social stratification. (5)

Early Classification Systems

While...