Beyond Best Practices: Strict Scrutiny as a Regulatory Model for Race-Specific Medicines

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Bolnick notes the following: [A]lthough this body of work emphasizes the individual as the crucial unit of analysis, individual ancestry inference is closely tied to our understanding of human groups and the distribution of genetic variation among them. Inferring an individual's genetic ancestry entails deciding that his or her DNA was inherited from a certain group or groups, and that cannot be accomplished unless one first distinguishes groups that differ genetically in some way. Thus, even such individually-oriented genetic research has implications for our understanding of race and the pattern of human biological diversity.

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Bolnick states that the fact that structure identifies a particular number of clusters is insignificant: It does so simply because the user told it to do so. What is more important is that structure provides a way to determine the value of K that is most appropriate for the dataset in question (i.e. the most likely number of clusters or populations represented.) The ‘best’ value of K is the one that maximizes the probability of observing that set of data…. However, it is not entirely straightforward to determine the true number of genetic clusters in a given dataset for three reasons…[:] First, because it is computationally difficult, … structure provides only an approximation. Second, if a dataset is complex, different runs of structure may produce substantially different results. Third, the underlying model used in the structure program is not appropriate for all datasets. Id., at 7–8; manuscript on file with author.

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