Lessons from History: Why Race and Ethnicity Have Played a Major Role in Biomedical Research

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This segment is based upon an earlier paper: Duster T. , “Behavioral Genetics and Explanations of the Link between Crime, Violence, and Race,” in Parens E. Chapman A. R. and Press N. , eds., Wrestling with Behavioral Genetics: Science, Ethics, and Public Conversation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

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There is the specter of an infinite regression problem with the notion that an anti-social personality will emerge to wreak the havoc of “deviant behavior” in whatever social community in which it appears. In a community of convicts, the infinite regress predicts that an anti-social personality would surface against the dominant social normative order. This is the ironic inversion of Emile Durkheim's insight that “a community of saints would produce a deviant.” Durkheim was reflecting upon the social functions of deviance, not upon the etiology of a particular deviant behavior among his hypothetical saints. Durkheim E. , “The Normal and Pathological,” in Kelly D. H. , Deviant Behavior (New York: St. Martin's Press, 5th edition, 1996): 59–63.

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At the February 11, 1992 Meeting of the National Mental Health Advisory Council, of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Frederick Goodwin, at that time Director of Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration (ADAMHA), made the following remarks (from the official unedited transcripts of the meeting): “If you look, for example, at male monkeys, especially in the wild, roughly half of them survive to adulthood. The other half die by violence. That is the natural way of it for males, to knock each other off and, in fact, there are some interesting evolutionary implications of that because the same hyper-aggressive monkeys who kill each other are also hyper-sexual, so they copulate more and therefore they reproduce more to offset the fact that half of them are dying.” After these remarks, Dr. Goodwin was “demoted” by Secretary of Health and Human Services Lewis Sullivan to the position of Director of the National Institute of Mental Health.

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Wright R. , “The Biology of Violence,” New Yorker, March 13, 1995, at 68–77.

Id., at 74.

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Cartwright , supra note 13.

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Duster T. , “Pattern, Purpose and Race in the Drug War,” in Reinarman C. and Levine H. G. , eds., Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997): 260–87; and Duster T. , “The New Crisis of Legitimacy in Controls, Prisons, and Legal Structures,” The American Sociologist 26, no. 1 (1995): 20–27.