Seminar: "Biological Race without Genetics"

"Recently the concept of human race has become popular again in science and it has been reintroduced in inductive inferences on epidemiological differences among human groups. In particular racial categories are used as proxies for genetic susceptibilities to some complex diseases. Is this use justified from an epistemiological point of view? If it is not, should we firmly ban race from science? After an introduction to the ontological and epistemiological debate on race, I question the current use of race in biomedicine and I argue that an alternative and promising explanatory and heuristic role of race exists where race is used to capture the complexity of the effect of present and past racism on people's health and investigate risk-related external and internal exposures, gene-environment interactions, and epigenetic events which we would otherwise fail to fully consider."