Radiolab - Race

Episode Date: December 15, 2008

This hour of Radiolab, a look at race. 

Your to... Your... ...to... ...to radio lab. From NPR and WNYC. Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States. June 26, 2000, 1019 a.m. at the White House. This is the moment that race died.

Good morning. We are here to celebrate the completion of the first survey of the entire human genome. of the entire human genome of the entire human genome. See, for 100 years, scientists, or at least a certain group of scientists, had been trying to prove that race is real. It is not just something that we see with our eyes,

but in fact, there is something fundamentally different between a person who is white and a person who is black. Or Asian, and they looked at blood differences. Nothing. They looked at differences in musculature. The size of our heads, nothing. They couldn't really say,

this is this and that is that. Then... In 2000, It is my great pleasure. Bill Clinton introduces two of the most important scientists in the world. Dr. Francis Collins and Craig Venter. Both of whom get up to the podium and say, look, we have searched all the way down to our DNA. Can't get any deeper than that.

And when it comes to race? The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis. It's just not there. What that means is that modern science has confirmed what we first learned from ancient fates. the most important fact of life on this earth is our common humanity. But a couple of years down the road, if you fast forward, we began to look more closely, and we began to notice

some subtle differences based on ethnic background. Differences. Differences in people's health and race. And the differences seemed like they could be important. That some genetic diseases target racial or ethnic groups more than others. So that now, just a couple years later, even some of the scientists who were on the podium that day saying it was all over, even they have started to rethink.

Are we rolling? Yes, we're rolling. We are rolling. All right. That's Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project. Now, in 2000, you were standing with Bill Clinton and Craig Venter. Do you remember this day? I do remember June 26, 2000, yes.

It would be hard to forget that one. What was the weather like out of curiosity? It was really hot that morning. But really, we didn't want to talk to Francis about that day. I actually wanted to ask him about something he said a couple years afterwards, something he wrote in a medical journal. Could you read the not, the fancy saying not? Oh, well, let's just read it to you. This is you talking. Okay, here it is.

Increasing scientific evidence, however, indicates that genetic variation can be used to make a reasonably accurate prediction of geographic origins. It is not strictly true that race or ethnicity has no biological connection. So that's what we're kind of wondering. It's not strictly true that it has. no biological connection. It's a very careful tiptoe. I won't defend that as being the world's best sentence construction.

But there's something that you want to say that you don't quite pass through your lips, it sounds like. Well, let me try again here. I think there are two points you can make about race and genetics. One is we're really all very much alike, incredibly alike. But you can also say even that small amount of difference turns out to be revealing. So that's our show today.

What exactly can science reveal about race? Does it exist? Does it not exist? What really can you say about it? Yes. I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Crilwich. This is Radio Lab.

Okay, you ready? Three, two, one. So let's go back and consider Francis Collins' state. It is not strictly... Okay, stop, stop. So it's not strictly speaking true that race has no biological connection. Who are you? I'm Nell Greenfield Boyce.

I'm a science reporter with National Public Radio. But for the moment, I'm your grammar instructor. So take this double negative and make it into a sentence that is without the double negative. It is not actually true to do that race has something to do with biology, right? Right, right, right, right. But while he is tiptoeing around with his fancy double negatives, some people out in the real world... That sounds like a cell phone. I'm getting rid of that right now.

Are taking that concept and they're just running with it. Hello, can you hear me? Hello, hello. Who's running with it exactly, and how? Good. Well, I talked with one detective in Louisiana. Let me just make sure I have your name pronounced correctly. Sure.

My name is Kip, Judis. I am the patrol commander at the Lafayette Parish Sheriff's Office at the rank of captain. Who says that he actually used DNA to say something about race. When was this all going down? C 2002, 2003. And that that helped him catch a serial killer. We had a victim who had been blundering. to death. Gronisha Colum was only 23 years old. She was left in a field and found by some hunters.

It is believed her final moments alive were spent visiting her mother's grave. Her abandoned her abandoned her cemetery right near her mother's grave site. In just over a year, four women have been murdered in Louisiana. Their deaths linked by DNA evidence. DNA evidence at all of the crime scenes that point to a single killer. A serial killer. The media dubbed him the Baton Rouge serial killer. It was in the news all. Almost daily. Self-defense classes are filling with frightened women. Where will he strike next?

Based on some witness information. The suspected killer is believed to be a white male. He is described as a white male. White male in a white truck. Everything at that point they had made it seem like it was probably a white guy. Yes. I mean, they had this eyewitness report, the fact that there seemed to be a serial killer and most serial killers are thought to be white guys.

And they started testing hundreds of white men. Police have launched an extraordinary effort to take DNA samples. DNA samples from nearly a thousand men. They were doing kind of a genetic drag net. A drag net for a serial killer. In an area where crime tape is becoming part of the landscape. Bob McNamara, CBS News, Baton Rouge. It wasn't looking very promising.

So they went and they asked, you know, their crime lab. Is there anything in a DNA profile that identifies race? I mean, we have the perpetrator's DNA. Can we look at that and say whether it's a white guy or a black guy? immediate answer we had was no, there's not. You can't do that. There's not a marker. There's not a gene. Because, you know, race is not biological, right? However, there was some technology out there that was looking into it. We're the first company, I think, in the world to infer phenotypes for forensics cases.

That's Tony Ferdakis. He owns a company in Florida that sells tests, genetic tests, that he claims can be like an eyewitness and tell you something about a person, what they look like. characteristics like eye colors and hair colors and skin color. And the cops in Louisiana took him up on it. We submitted the suspect profile to them. And when the test came back, this particular case, the individual was primarily of African ancestry. A black guy? Yes.

Over 90% likely that it was a black male. I do think it's important to note that there were other lines of evidence that had been developing that made them think a black guy was likely. But the DNA result, I mean, that was science. Within three or four days after that, state police called and said, we have a match. The rest of his history, he's since been convicted of two of the murders. So, wait, they caught the guy and he was, in fact, black? Yes.

So does that mean that Tony Friedeuf, what is it? Frodakis. Tony Ferdegas has somehow found the gene for race, that there is a race gene? It's much more complicated than that. And it all boils down to this idea of ancestry. Ancestry byDNA.com. You know, you can go online to his company, DNA Print, and they will send you A kit.

With just a simple mouth swab you do at home, you can discover your unique genetic ancestry. Okay. Okay. My kit. And it's like a little science kit. Yeah? We're listening to Chad. I'm not taking a DNA test while being interrupted by his wife.

I'm taking a DNA test. And it's got these like swabs. Open one of these sterile swabs. And you like, you know, rub your cheek with it. Oh. Ha ha. Ha ha. You literally just send this through the mail to the DNA print corporate.

headquarters in Sarasota, Florida. And I went there. Hi. Hi. How are you? Good. I'm Nell Greenfield Boys. Oh, yeah. Okay, so after the cheek sales arrive in Florida, this is where items of evidence come. I guess they run it through a bunch of machines. What exactly in the end are they looking at that gives them like some sense of my race? Well, in your DNA, there's lots of information. There's billions of different little DNA letters. Letters. Letters. Letters. Letters. Letters. Letters. Let me play with this just for a second.

If I were to have you recite all the letters in your DNA at one letter per second, you know how long it would take you to spell yourself? An hour. No, no. It would take you... Six months. A century. What? It would take you a century. Really? To make it even more interesting. Instead of just you, let's have you compared to me.

You mean like if we both read it at one per second? Yeah. We would be absolutely identical for about 17. minutes before there'd be any difference between us. Wow. And every difference that there is, whether it's like a little chemical tea or a little chemical G or whatever, has a story behind it.

How do you mean? Well, we all started in the same place together. Well, the evidence is very good that the human race, as we currently know it, had its origins in Africa. According to Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, in the neighborhood of 100,000 years ago

with as few as 10,000 people, But soon after that, humans began to fan out across the globe. Some of us went east into Arabia. Some of us went up north across the Sahari into the Mediterranean area. All the while, all these people are having babies. And in the process, the DNA is getting copied. Over and over and over. Parent the kid.

But sometimes the copying isn't exactly perfect. So every so often, you'll find a copying error. C. C. No. Yes, that one right there. Let's imagine that error. A. C.

No. Occurred in Asia about 25,000 years ago. Imagine a Chinese woman had a baby, and the baby was one letter different from the mommy. An accident. The A and the mom became a C in the baby. And then that C was handed down. And you got another C. And you got another C.

And a thousand years down the road, I look into your DNA and I see that same mistake in the same spot. You know what I know? What? I now have a hunch that if I shook your family tree really hard, some Chinese ancestors would pop out. It's sort of like a souvenir that your ancestors handed you down in your blood, that you carry with you in every cell in your body. So they've identified about 180 little variations in the DNA. Little souvenirs. That people who share ancestry, share, I guess, is the way to put it.

Whose sample did you send in? Was it yours? Oh, I'm not going to tell you. Okay, that's all right. You tell me. Yeah, we'll show you. We've got it on a CD. So we leave the lab and we go down this hallway to his office. We've determined that it is of alien origin.

No, I'm just kidding. That would explain a lot, actually. He pulls these things up on his computer screen. I'll show you what your results were. So what does it say? I'm dying here. Well, I guess before I tell you... Okay, that sample was determined to be...

I want to know what you think. What do you think it's going to be? Um, well, my folks are Arab, light skin, both of them. My dad. Yeah, it's got some darker-skinned people on his side of the family. So if I had to guess, probably some European in there. And then my dad's side, I was thinking, well, they're probably like Greek or Turkish way back when. I wasn't really sure.

And I consciously didn't sort of look into it. Okay, well, let me just tell you that this test you took is not going to tell you countries. Right, right, right. Okay. I'm oddly kind of nervous, weirdly. Really? Yeah, just a little bit. So your sub-Saharan African ancestry, what percentage are you thinking?

I'm going to guess 12? Zero percent. Zero? Huh. All right. Native American ancestry. One percent. East Asian.

Five percent. Wow. European. 94 percent. Really? 94 percent. 94 percent European? No, 94 percent, Poundsy!

Note that the words that we're using here are pretty arbitrary. You should understand that his definition of quote unquote European, includes... The Fertile Crescent or the Middle East. Wow. So wait a second. If I'm a police... Remember, we started this conversation

and a cop was looking to describe a perpetrator. Right. So if I find out that Jed and Boomrod is European, then I'm looking for someone who could be... It's a huge range. We're looking at the computer screen now. For example. You've pulled up a bunch of digital photos.

When Tony Friedegas pulled up pictures of people with my exact ancestral mix... Yeah. You know from his database? Okay, database. here's some males. Here's a female. He brought up people with blonde hair, blue eyes.

These are all people that had this sort of mix. Even people from Poland who had like really red cheeks. So these folks just look like pretty much like white folks to me. Run of the mill. Let me show you the picture of the guy who actually gave the sample. Now Mr. Fudakis does not know that Chad is a dark, curly-haired, swarthy man. So this is the guy. And he doesn't really know anything about his ancestry,

but his mother and father, I believe, are from Lebanon. Although in this sample of maybe 20 people, it's just we don't have any samples of Lebanese in this particular query. Right, but I guess what I'm saying is for a cop, someone who describes themselves as Lebanese versus Polish. I mean, that would be a really big difference. Oh, yeah, and to make that sort of distinction, you need different markers set.

Well, so then what does DNA actually tell you then? Well, not a lot that's direct. What he's doing basically is playing a guessing game based on ancestral percentages. Like, for instance, I'm 94% European, zero percent sub-Saharan. He can plug that into his database, pull up the pictures,

and he will notice that nobody with those percentages is black. So he can tell, he'll tell police. This guy probably not black. Just like at the beginning we said that the perpetrator there was pretty much not white. Yeah. Now, there is one thing he can read directly in our DNA. What?

Eye color. So at the end of the day, he can say, I am not black and I have brown eyes. That's it? That's as far as he can go. That's all he can tell you is a scientist. He does take it further. What do you do? Well, if he's got a DNA sample of a perp, he can go to his computer database. He can say, okay, database.

Show me everybody who's got these exact same percentages, show me their pictures. Now, tell me what all of these faces have in common, visually. Like, what's their average? Nose width. What's their average? The shape of the ears. How big are their skulls? Skull shape.

You see where this is going. And then what he tells the police, look for a... Look for people who have, you know, this... type of head, kind of ear. But this isn't genetics now. This is just photo averaging. Photo averaging, yeah. So this isn't science. This is something else. Right, but when you hear things like measuring skulls, measuring ears,

it's hard not to think back to pretty nasty periods of our history. Like the eugenicists, they tried to composite pictures into one face. They measured skulls, and they ended up inspiring the Nazis. Have people called you a racist? Not once. Not once. Have I been called a racist? Not once.

That kind of surprises me. I'm just sort of wondering how do you think you've escaped that? Hmm. Are people critical of this? Yeah, I think a lot of scientists, their first knee-jerk reaction is is that the poor masses out there aren't intelligent enough to handle this sort of information. They'll start climbing over one another and killing themselves so that we, the smart ones, need to sort of obfuscate. I don't think that works very well. People may be a lot smarter than we might give them credit for being.

I think he's onto something there. What do you mean? Well, there is a tendency that people have when this subject comes up to say, shh, we don't talk about that. I think people can talk about the real world and real differences respectfully

and even with a certain amount of delicious interest. Sure. Yeah. Well, you say sure, but there are lots of shushers everywhere. You're not going to get me to stand on the side of shushing. It's just, I mean, science complicates things. Even now, this whole, you know, definition that science has of race being like ancestry or whatever. It just doesn't jive with how people live race.

You mean how people talk about it, really? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, here. Take a look at this photo. This one here? Yeah. Yeah.

You see the guy there? Yes. What race do you think he is? He's back. Definitely. Definitely. Oh, yeah. How black is he? How black is he? What kind of a question of?

Yeah, just for a visual. Black, black. How about Obama black? No, he's not. He's blacker than that. So he's unequivocally black, right? I don't know. My parents taught us, because they came from a segregated south, you were either black or you were white. There was no in between.

So the guy you're looking at, the guy we just heard? That's Wayne Joseph. He's an education director in L.A., and he also, on the side, writes essays about race mostly for national magazines. And one day, a couple years back, he was watching TV. And I happened to see a TV program highlighting the fact that a couple of DNA labs were actually doing racial testing on DNA. Lightbul went on. I said, well, this will be perfect for this essay. He thought he'd test himself.

See what percentage of him was black versus other stuff. And then write about it. But what number did you think you would be? The number I was thinking was 70 or 75 percent or more. 75% African and 25% Who knows what? So I sent away for the kit. Swab both cheeks, put it in a vial, sent it back.

And then, a few weeks later, I get back the results. First thing I did was I checked the kit number to make sure that they hadn't made a mistake and sent me someone else's results. But the kit number matched. I couldn't believe it. 57% Indo-European, 39% Native American, 4% Asian and 0% African.

0% as in 0. Nothing. I mean, I've lived 50 years as a black man, and I have no African genetically. How did you make sense of that? Did it sink in all at once? No, what happened was after a couple of days, I hadn't told my wife anything yet.

I went to see my mother, and I said, look, there's only one really logical explanation I can live with. It's okay. I love you. Just tell me the truth. I'm adopted. She kind of giggled and she said, look, I can remember every pain I had having you. I can still remember it. I said, well, but then this doesn't make any sense. She said, yeah, it's a little surprising, but I'm too old, too tired to be anything else. So that's just the way it is. For my brother, when I told him the results, he said, Wayne, that's your DNA? That's not my DNA. I'm a black man. And that's the end of it for him. What about your wife? Well, my second wife happens to be Jewish. Her response was,

what do you mean? You're a black man. I defied my mother to marry you. You've got to be black. Whoa. So she needed you to be alive? Absolutely. Because she had told her mother at the time, look, I'm marrying Wayne. You're going to have to decide whether you're going to accept him or lose your daughter. It really threw me for a loop. You start thinking about your life. There are certain decisions that are made in life based on who you think you are. Would I have married a black woman the first time? Would I have decided to go to black high school? Do you have answers to those questions?

would you have married a black woman, would you have gone to a black high school? Maybe not. How different would my life have been if I'd have known this 45 years ago? Wayne Joseph is the Director of Alternative Education for the Chino Valley School District in California. A radio lab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Science Foundation. This is Radio Lab. I'm Chad Appumrod. And I'm Robert Krollwitch. Today's program is about race. Okay, so where are we?

What do we learn? We've learned that scientists when they talk about race. They don't really mean race. No, they mean that you have a set of ancestors who lived in a particular place on this planet for a while. While they were there, they acquired certain features, skin color, hair texture, whatever. And scientists won't go much further than just that. But here's the thing. If you're, forget to lab scientists for a second.

If you're a doctor and your job is to save lives, you can't help but notice that there's are real differences between groups in terms of how healthy people are. And if you want to treat that, you end up talking about race. And it never goes well. Let me tell you the story now. It comes from our producer, Soren Wheeler, and it's about a drug called Bidal. So you popped a few of Biddle this morning? I did.

I just wanted to test it out. It's supposed to, it loosens up the arteries. That's supposedly, so it's easier for the heart to pump. As a white man that's about to talk about race on the radio, I figured it's time to loosen up. Okay, but introduce me to our main dude here. I'm Dr. Jay Cohn, a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School. This is him. And what did you have for breakfast this morning?

I don't eat breakfast. Tell me what he looks like? Well, he's stocky, he's got a white beard. He's kind of got that wearied, grave doctor look. Probably because he spent his entire career worrying about how to help people with heart failure. That's right. Which for a really long time was kind of a lost cause. Oh, yeah.

It was a hopeless disease. that once it developed, the implication was that the patient would die. You're done. There was nothing much we could do but keep the patient comfortable. But then... Back in the early 70s... Jay had kind of a breakthrough. The aha moment was the first patient,

bedridden patient, can't breathe easily, bubbling up with fluid in the lungs. Jay gave this patient a combination of two drugs. And the moment we did that, this patient said, suddenly said, my God, I can breathe easily for the first time in months. That fast? Oh, it's immediate. He confirms the effect in a longer-term trial over five years.

He gets a patent. He finds a company. They put it in a pill. And they take it to the FDA. And that's when the FDA said no. No. No. That's what they said.

Why no? You just said it worked really well. Well, the doctors on the review board, they said they thought the drug was pretty good. Yeah. They even started using it with some of their patients. But they denied approval. Because it was not a big study. The study was just too small.

In the entire trial, there were only 86 people. That got the drug. We were disappointed, frustrated. We were using it. I was using it in my patients. Drag. Yeah. So he goes back to what he was doing before all this started,

which was trying to figure out what the hell's going on with heart failure. What the hell was going on with heart failure at that point? Well, at the time, scientists were, just starting to look at racial differences. When it comes to things like high blood pressure and heart problems that black Americans were suffering a lot more than white Americans. I see, so he must have been hearing all this stuff. This debate was going on out there, and Jay was listening.

So Jay started thinking, you know, he had all that old data, and they had actually broken it up by race. Everyone checked a box. Black, white, American Indian, all that. They'd never bothered to look at that stuff. Never teased it out. And I said, we should go back into our... database. Because just maybe, maybe black people respond differently to BIDL. Well, we thought it would

be worthwhile to go back and look. We didn't know what we were going to find. We just went back and checked off those people who had said they were black. Jay's assistant gathered up the data, and when they looked at the numbers... Oh my God. He saw a bump. What do you mean? Well, still just a small trial, but in that trial, the black patients did better. Significantly better. Really? So he published, and a couple weeks later, he gets a call from a drug company, and they say, we'd like to do something with BIDO. They would be willing to do a trial to demonstrate the efficacy of Bidil.

But here's the thing. They wanted to do the trial just with black people. That seemed to be the path of least resistance. Why would they want to limit it just to black people? Well, they could do a smaller study so it would be cheaper. And when it came time to sell the drug, ready-made market. All right, so they do this big study only in black people. Only in black people.

And what do they find? An amazing result. We get a 43% reduction in mortality. Wait, what? In other words, if you were a black person in this trial and you took BIDL, your chance of dying from heart failure was cut in half, roughly. That's huge. It's huge.

Yeah. So they go back in 2005. That's Troy Duster, a sociologist at NYU. The FDA approves this as the first racialized drug. Think about that. The first racialized drug. drug, the first drug ever approved for a racialized subpopulation. After hundreds of years of looking for differences between black people and white people,

after the mapping of the human genome, here's the FDA saying, we're different. So some of us said this is a huge mistake. We knew this was a terribly sensitive issue. As we move into the 21st century, well aware of the terrible history of racial and ethnic categories, what should we do? We had a symposium here at the University of Minnesota. We actually have a sold-out crowd today. And it was mainly aimed at attacking me.

I just don't think race is a scientific category. And there was a very well-known law professor so hostile to the idea that she said, I would rather die from heart failure than take by do. Well, that's not quite what she said. I'd be terrified about a doctor making a diagnosis like that based on their view of me as belonging to a particular racial category. Well, but it goes on all the time. That doesn't make it right. That's what I'd say. You know, that doesn't that that right. It does. And these categories have, you know, it's, look, you would object then to

a doctor seeing an African American with anemia. I said if you went into the doctor's office, and were anemic, the doctor would appropriately check you for sickle cell. It's just a natural everyday phenomenon in practice. And she insisted, well, that's wrong. Because sickle cell disease is not confined to blacks. Well, she is right, of course, but the statistical likelihood of a white person with sickle cell disease is so low. But there are prevalence issues. There is a higher...

We can look at a patient and help... and help identify some processes of diagnosis and treatment that might improve our precision. To disregard that, we need a better way to do it. But that's just it. I think that if we have... It seems to me that these racial categories are impeding good medical care and good biomedical research.

They're not assisting it. Well, I don't get that at all. Why would declaring a difference impede? It seems exactly the opposite. If you know that a group of people are likely to get sick in a certain way, then you should target them and help them. The question is, do you know what you think you know, I think is what she's saying? And by looking at one target group, are you somehow shutting yourself off from the real target group that you should be looking at? I don't know what you're talking about.

Let me give you an example. Okay. When you go to the doctor and they put that thing around your bicep and they go, yes, the squeeze. Yeah, blood pressure, okay? It's well known that black Americans have much. higher rates of high blood pressure, hypertension. Yes, it is.

Which is my point. Hold up. Hold up. It can seem like it's caused by race or it's purely a racial phenomenon. But then I mentioned this to Troy Duster. I said, how do you explain this? Black Americans suffer like twice the amount of hypertension than white Americans. Make the argument for me that this is somehow not an innate difference.

Okay. The best argument here is Richard Cooper's work. I'm Richard Cooper. I'm the chair of the Department of Preventing Medicine and Epidemiology. here at Loyola. Richard Cooper is a doctor and a researcher, and here's what he did. He went to poor neighborhoods in Chicago and methodically. House-to-house, taking blood samples.

Measured people's blood pressure. And then he took that data and compared it to other countries. Canada, Spain, Italy, United Kingdom. That's huge. Eight-nation sampling. 85,000 people. 85,000 people. 85,000.

And he then erased nations in terms of hypertension. Because he wanted to know, like, who's got the highest rates, who's got the lowest. and does this really have anything to do with the race? Right. And? At the very end, the nation with the highest rate of hypertension known... Drumroll, please? It's Germany.

Germany? Germany? Actually, Richard Cooper says that Finland, Poland, and Russia are even worse. Right. Okay? How many black people are in Russia? Seven. Probably seven. And the nation with the lowest rate of hypertension known as Nigeria.

No kidding. Yeah, and it's like this. It's not like this. It's like this. You put it in your hands way apart from each other. Okay, okay, okay, okay. Your point being here, what, exactly? Not obvious.

I mean, if you're a doctor and you're just focused on the United States data, you would assume that it has something to do with race, these high blood pressure disparities. So you'd therefore, A, miss all the Russians and Finns that came into your office. B, you would overtreat the American blacks, and C, God forbid, a Nigerian should walk in. You're going to give them all these drugs he doesn't even need. Well, then what does cause the differences?

Like if it's not race, what is it? Yeah, if not race, what? Diet. Diet? Yeah, diet. Really? According to Richard Cooper. I know it's not that exciting, but that's what he says.

Well, then what about Bidwell, then? You think that's wrong, too? No, I mean, but if you are the first drug ever to be approved for black people, wouldn't you want to know that your drug works better for black people that's compared to other groups? Yes. And you want to be sure, right? Yes. Well, they only ever tested it in black people.

Well, they never actually compared blacks to whites. Yeah, well, that's true. We don't know. We haven't gone back and studied a large white population. I personally believe that Bidil will work in white people as well. Maybe not to the same frequency, but I use it in my white patients. Are you at all then upset that it's... That's Thorne Wheeler again? It's FDA approved only for blacks.

Well, it's not getting to blacks. I mean, that's the real tragedy. What's he talking about? Well, in the end, Bidal kind of tanked. Why? you know, the way they priced and marketed the drug, all that kind of stuff. But according to Jay, it was also because of opposition to the idea. To the concept of BIDAL.

That this is a drug for blacks. It's a crime that this life-saving drug is not being as widely used as it should be. I'm very discouraged about that. So the takeaway here, I guess, is if a doctor or a scientist or a pharmaceutical company announces that there is a racial difference in the human. human family, check the footnotes. Exactly. On the other hand, I think an awful lot of us in our regular life get all excited about racial

differences when we watch sports. I mean, everyone notices, for example, in track and field. Like, why do all the Jamaicans win? Yeah. Always Jamaicans. So we founded Jamaican, our own Jamaican. Malcolm Gladwell, a writer. He's sort of Jamaican.

He's Canadian Jamaican English. Also the author of The Tipping Point and, I don't know, all those bestselling books. We talked to him about his early days as a runner. My running weight when I was 13 and 14 was about 105. 100. So you like just kind of danced on the ground? I'm 30 pounds heavier than I was in my running prime. Are you good?

Yes, at that age. Am I good in the global sense? No. Was I good at 13? I was really good. I was all Canadian, yeah. Oh, you're number one in your country. In what event?

1,500 meters. Age class. track and field in Ontario in the 1970s was so overwhelmingly West Indian. It was, in retrospect, it's hilarious to think back on it. I mean, you would go to these track meets, and there's like reggae music playing in the entire time, and the stands are full of Jamaicans. So you were dealing with this fact, you know, you're 13, you're not very sophisticated. You're dealing with this fact that there just aren't any white people.

It's all Jamaicans. in lanes one through eight are all Jamaicans, right off the boat, Jamaicans. And so you begin, and when you see, it was really funny. I remember there was a guy named Arnold Stotz, and Arnold Stottes dominated the quarter mile for years in age class running. Arnold Stats was a white guy. He was a white guy, and we all looked at Arnold and we said, it's not going to last, right?

Can't last. Sure not, it didn't. You thought Arnold won't make it because he doesn't have the right stuff, the right stuff being whatever it is that you're not Jamaica. The question was, how long can Arnold keep, beating the Jamaicans. And the answer is, it can't be for that much longer. And he was a tremendous sprinter. But we had this kind of unspoken prejudice that said, if you weren't Jamaican, it was hopeless. And did you ever have an opportunity at the age of 14 to ascribe this to anything?

I mean, I began to kind of process it in a very, very crude, unsophisticated way. And then I would look at the world, and I would see in the world black people won all sprints. So I figured, well, maybe just black people are faster than white people. So in a very primitive young guy kind of way, Malcolm was, I don't know exactly what the polite word for this is, but he was a racist or a chauvinist maybe or just somebody who sees West Indians winning everything. So he figures there's got to be a genetic advantage here because he could feel it in himself. Listen, I had that gift. I was really, really good when I was 15 and 14 and 13. I was the best in Canada.

I used to beat Dave Reed. Dave Reed went on to be on the Canadian Olympic team. Oh, really? Yeah. That was the thing. That was the caliber of runner I was with. How old were you and Dave Reed at the time when you were beating him? 14.

Okay. Let's make that clear. But now that he's older. And slower. And slower. He's revised his thinking in this area. I no longer am all that enamored of a kind of genetic case for black athletic superiority. I think it maybe explains some tiny amount, but it's not the real issue.

Nature takes care of the fundamental things in the beginning. And then as we, as activities grow, more involved and more complex, individual choice starts to matter more and more and more and more. And when he says individual choice, he's thinking of the moment when you're an athlete and it's the last turn or maybe the last lap of a race. When you've run 1,200 meters in a 1,500 meter race or you've run 6 miles of a 7 mile cross-country race, you're beginning to suffer. Pain is about to start. You're in a position where you possibly can win if you exert yourself. And that's the moment, says Malta. when every athlete has to ask.

How much do I care? There's always a struggle. Do I really care? Does it matter to me? Do you think that Mickey Mantle or... Oh, I think everyone has to... You think? All athletes have that question. Some people say I do care and some people say I don't.

And how you answer that question, yes or no, has very little to do with genes, says Malta. That's not the critical difference between me and Tiger Woods. You know, it's that Tiger gets up at five. in the morning and hits 10,000 golf balls before breakfast. That's the difference. Why does he want to do that? And why is that inconceivable for me to do?

There's your interesting story. In Malcolm's case, he says he did love running. You know, when you're that age, you really can't run forever. I'll never forget the feeling. But he also loved reading books, and he loved going to school, and he loved thinking. Bing pong. He might have like ping pong. I don't know.

My father comes from that glorious tradition of English amateurism, which says you should do many things and none of them well. All of which, in that critical moment, made answering, Yes, I will put up with the pain and win this race, a little bit more difficult. I struggle with it, and there was a moment when I had that conversation, and I decided I didn't care. And the moment happened when he was preparing for the Canadian National Championship. Canadian Championship.

Two of his friends who were also black. I go for a run with this guy Dave Reed. He was the great runner of my generation. And another guy named Chris Brewster, another great runner of my generation. At the time, we would have thought of. ourselves as equals. But those guys didn't have as many, you know, options as Malcolm. And there's a famous hill called Telegraph Hill, or no, Signal Hill.

Steep is the steepest, it's like running up the steepest flight of steps you've ever. I mean, it goes up for money. Sort of like San Francisco steep. Yeah, it goes up forever. And the first day, I think, we ran up it. And I just thought this is ridiculous. Because you're huffing and puffing or because you have... Just like, why would we do this?

Like, it just seemed crazy. And then the next day we went there, we ran like seven miles to Signal Hill. And then Dave Reed and Chris Brouser decided they wanted to run up the hill backwards. Really? Which is, you know, you just run seven miles at probably 5.45 pace. It's six in the morning. And they want to run up this huge hill backwards. And I said, no.

And I went home. I didn't want to run anymore. I wanted to be on the debating team. And I wanted to read books. And I wanted to hang out with my friend Terry. I quit. So what is left to say about these genetically based racial differences in your mind? Very little.

So all the things that we've been talking about in this show, that maybe there is a tendency to get sick in a certain way, maybe some medicines work a little better for one group than another. Let's say it's all true. You say it's true, but it's not true enough to me, anything but a very short story. Yeah, I don't, I mean, I'll grant you all. those things and then I'll roll my eyes and say I don't really care. Malcolm Gladwell's latest book is called Outliers and Radio Lab will return in a moment.

This is Chad Keneke calling you from my living room in Cincinnati, Ohio. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Thanks. Hey, I'm Chad I boomrod. And I'm Robert Krollw. This is Radio Lab.

Our topic today is race. What science can or cannot tell us about race? Now that we're at the towards the back end of the program, we can confess. We're at the front end of the back end. We can confess that what we asked before, what could a scientist tell us that's hard and true about the biology of race? Nothing. No, it's better than nothing. All right, something.

But once you drop the science part of race and think of it as just a way of sorting people into uses and them, then it gets interesting. Or at the very least, more complicated. I didn't know. Here's an example. We're uptown, Manhattan's 1 p.m. third period's about to start. We're at a charter school called Facing History, which has about 150 kids, mostly Hispanic. And we'd come because we'd heard that every year in the ninth grade, they do this particular guessing exercise. Okay, all these microphones and other people that you guys see today, they are not in the room.

You can ignore them like sometimes you want to ignore me. This is first year teacher David Sharon. He tells his class of about 12 freshmen to pull up their seats into a semicircle. Same class style as always. Let's go. And to get on their race goggles. All right. So we have an activity here called sorting people.

Okay? After handing out some worksheets, David kills the lights, flips on his overhead projector, and immediately eight faces appear projected onto the wall. What I want us to do is go kind of one by one and try to decide, try to come to a consensus, okay, what race are these people based on looking at them and then we'll test it out? He explains they've got four choices,

black, white, Asian, Native American. So why don't we start that with the first one? The woman on the top left. Pink cheeks, light skin, bushy hair, Big Filipino nose. At least that's how it looked to me. Damar, what do you think? White. Richard?

Black. Trackeram, what do you think? She just seems white, but then when you look at her hair, it seems like if she's black. Dibby? Black. I'm going to go with white. So what do we think for the man on the bottom left? Mustache, borderline afro.

Asian. Native American. A vaguely ethnic version of Tom Selleck. I'm picking between white and Asian. White or Asian? Or Native American. I think he's black. Black.

Hispanic? We're actually not going to use Hispanic. So let's take a vote here. How many people say black? Three. Okay. White. Four.

How many people say Native American? All right. To cut to the chase, after eight of these faces, David revealed the results. Turned out, Pink-Face Girl was black. Tom Selleck was Asian. And all in all, the class got three right. Three out of eight. Which thrilled David.

What does this take? tell us. One of the kids in the back of the class, a girl named Bianca, finally says, well, what it tells us is this activity. It's retarded. Sorry. It's stupid. Why?

Because it's stupid. You'd be a bit more specific. Okay, so let's say that you had a white mother and a black father. The child will come out brown. No, it would come out gray. How would it come out gray? No, it would come out brown. Okay, I'm not white or black.

I'm Dominican. My mother is light skin. like David's color, and my father is dark skin. And I came out on mixed color. I'm brown. So it's browner race, so I guess I'm brown then. Interestingly, in the cafeteria after class, when we ask people, how do they identify? It's going to sound like a dumb question, but what race are you?

Most people said something like this. Trinidadian. Ecuadorian. Dominican. They named a country. Mexican. Jamaican. I'm Colombian.

Puerto Rican. Almost no one said I'm one of those four official categories. If they mentioned it at all, it was just to say that they're somewhere in between. or that they switch back and forth. Half Puerto Rican, half Salvadorian. I'm a mix of black people and Spanish. Yeah, I'm Mexican, but I'm not 100% Mexican. My spirit is black.

If I'm, like, in my neighborhood, people see me as Spanish. But if I go, like, to my grandma's block, people see me as, like, white. When I go back home to Cuba, everybody, oh, that's the black kid. When I come here, all of a sudden, I change my race, so I become Hispanic. Do you do that, too? Do our race shift, like these kids? No, I mean, I get confused a lot. I mean, you could pass as a Jew, I think.

even though you're an Arab. Oh, yeah, in New York, forget it. But what's interesting is these kids, it wasn't like they were unaware of race. I mean, they're aware of it. It's just fluid for them. Because I guess so many of them can pass for different things, it becomes then all about, like, what you wear,

what you listen to, like small things in the end. But in some circumstances, we all know this, the tiniest differences can suddenly mean everything. We talked to, we're going to switch locations here from New York to Baghdad in Iraq. We talked to an Iraqi guy named Ali Ababa. who worked as a translator, as a journalist in Baghdad. Yeah, with NPR, Baghdad office.

And when you were growing up in Baghdad, when you were a kid, did you know whether you were Shia or Sunni? No, no, no. The first time I knew that I was Sunni or Shia, in fact, it was sixth grade. We were sitting after class break, and someone asked me if I'm a senior or Shia, like another kid. I remember it was a Tikriti kid.

That's a village where Saddam Hussein grew up. That's the town of Saddam grew up. What did you answer? I answered, I don't know. Because you really didn't know? I really didn't know. So they made fun of me, and they returned home, and they said to my mom, Am I a senior issue?

The first answer from my mom was a slap on my face. Really? Yeah. She said, never ask about these things. You're a Muslim, and that's all what you care about. But that was then. This is now. Today, says Ali in Baghdad.

you can't go around saying, I don't know who I am. Now, you have to choose. Yeah. Even if you don't want to. May, 2007, a friend of mine, close friend of mine, he calls me and says, Ali, did you hear about what happened to me? And I'm like, no, what happened?

He said, my father, they kidnapped him. His father is an old guy, 62, was just in his neighborhood buying candies for his grandson. And then he disappeared. Just disappeared. No one knows. And in Baghdad, when someone's cancer, kidnapped, they usually don't come back. Usually the body just shows up in a morgue. So,

what Ali's friend wanted is he wanted to go to back that morgue, to go and, you know, find his father. But the problem was, his friend couldn't go alone. Because he's Sunni, his name is Amar, and the morgue is completely controlled by Shia. If a Sunni man was trying to get his relative's body out of the morgue somewhere along the line, the Shia militia? They would check the names, and they would ask him about something, you know, deep Shia's religion questions. And if he fails to answer, they would just, you know, lynch him. They would what?

They would take him out of the hospital too somewhere. And? They probably killed and dump his body somewhere. Can I ask a really dumb question? Sure. You're walking through Baghdad. You're walking through this hospital. You see a Sunni, you see a Shia.

Can you tell the difference with your eyes at all? Um, sometimes you can't really know. But sometimes you could take advantage of it. this confusion to help a friend. Ali, after all, was always helping journalists get around Baghdad, and you never knew who was going to be asking you questions. Sometimes it would be a Sunni militia, sometimes a Shia militia. It's very hard to know.

So journalists would go around the town with two IDs, simultaneously. One would be a Shia ID, the other a Sunni ID. And they're putting it like somewhere in their pockets. You know, the right is the Sunni, the left is the Shia. Wait a second. The right is the Sunni, the left is the Shoe. is a Shia.

Yeah. So if in that split second, you think this guy's Sunni, you go right? And if you're Shia, you'll go left. You know, if it were me, I just, I know that, I know how I die. You would go left. I just, just the wrong side. But it's not really, it's not really fun, though. Especially when your job on this particular day is to take your Sunni friend into a hospital

controlled by a Shia militia. So Alid decided that to protect his Sunni friend, Amar, maybe the best protection would be a slight name change. When they went to the hospital, they would call him Amar, not Amar. Omar is a pure Sunni name. Amar is something in the middle. Could be, signor, could be sheen. And there's the same, is there different spellings?

Amar. Different spelling, yeah. Different spellings. They sound almost identical. Yeah, but, you know, just the alif or the A in the middle. And by adding that one letter, that one extra A, Ali hoped, that would keep his friend alive. So we went there, I took him, and my brother was Shia, who was also a physician at that time, came with us.

He came with us, and I told him not to call Amar-O-Mar. I told him to call Amar. So Ali and his friend and his brother, using this new name, got into the morgue, where they were taken to a room where everybody sits to look at pictures of people who are dead. We sat in that computer room, they call it, where there are like seven computer monitors. And there's someone on the side of the room where he's. holding the mouse and he's moving with his finger the pictures changing the pictures and people sitting on the ground probably 35 or 40 other people on the ground looking at

the pictures hoping not to see a picture of their brother or their mother or their father so whenever there's a picture of one of the relatives you will hear someone crying shouting wailing we were looking at the pictures looking at the pictures picture after picture after picture and you know we finally found reached a decision that his father wasn't among the pictures. And suddenly his father's picture comes out. Omar burst out and crying and, you know. And my brother would say, Omar, don't worry.

Amar, this is God's decision. This is guts. Da-da-da-da-da. And then he would say that. You'd say, no, Amar. Amar, Amar. And I would, you know, hit him on his chest. Don't say this word.

Don't say it. Because not only Omar will be killed, it'll be us as well. But nobody in the room apparently heard him say Amar, the wrong pronunciation. So they got a number from the picture, and then they had to go to a different part of the morgue to actually locate the body, and then, of course, bring it home for proper burial.

So we walked out from the computer room, we went to the refrigerator, which is actually not a refrigerator. It's just hallways. All these bodies dumped on both sides of the hallway. And as soon as you enter these hallways, you can barely hold your breath. The smell, the order, is so, so contingent.

It's like it's impossible to bear. And the whole ground is full of a thick layer of greasy blood. You know, it sticks to your foot. When you walk, it's like chis. And it was a very long hallway. Omar was, he actually fell twice. We would stop him from falling down and we would slap him on his face, wake up.

We've got to keep going. So we would walk all the way down. to find all these piles of body. Then in one pile, the guy who's wearing boots, the worker there, he would tell us, I think your father is within this pile. And he's like talking normally. He's unbothered by all of this.

He threw the buddies from this side and from this side. And then he took Omar's father from his arm and he just pulled him from underneath the pile. And Omar didn't want to believe that this was his father. He didn't want to believe. He said, I don't know. I don't think this is my father. I don't see him.

but the tag number was there. And because the tag number was there, they knew it was Amar's father. We came out, and we thought, you know, that's it. We're going to take the body and go home. And at that moment. They were suddenly approached by two Shia militiamen. Very obvious.

They're Shias, and they're from the Medi. From one of the most radical groups in Baghdad. And... One of them said, let me see you're on. ID. So Amar had to give him his physician's ID. But that ID had his real name, his Sunni name on him. He looked at it. So Amar, he said, huh. He said Amar.

Amar. Huh. So he knew. He knew. Yes. Yeah. He talked to his friend next to him. They kept whispering to each other about the ID. And we realized probably that's the moment when we're all going to die. Yeah, we're done. So immediately, immediately, we started talking to them in a very loud voice. Listen, guys, we are your colleagues here, whatever you need.

Come to the emergency room, ask for me, I'm Dr. Ali Abbas. And this is my brother, Khazrajabas, you know, to show them there were Shiaids. We started talking in a very heavy Shia accent, you know. You can come at any moment if you want. If you have anything, just tell us, let us know. We were your brothers. Help us here. And then they waited.

You know, we were kept looking at their own. eyes what they're doing and and thank God they gave us the papers back we got almost father out and he took him and buried him Ali Abbas has now left Baghdad he's moved to Brooklyn New York a neighborhood very proud of its mix of races and people from all over the world but remember Baghdad was a multicultural city as well for hundreds of years long than Brooklyn. So I asked him, now that you're here, given what you've seen, what do you think about us? I would tell you something. The subway is my, I would sit in a subway car, you know, and looking at the people, African Americans, Hispanic, white, you know, I question myself,

he's a Jew, he's not a Jew, he's Christian. I'm looking at the people and it's exactly this question that comes in my mind. How they're living together. How, how they're living together. How Does it seem like something that could explode? Oh, yeah. It's something that I always think. I mean, I look at them and look at all kind of phrases. And I'm wondering, how can this country hold that together? That was Ali Abbas, often a translator for National Public Radio.

Okay, time to go. RadioLab.org is our website. RadioLab at WNYC.org is our email. I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Krollwich. Thanks for listening. Radio Lab is produced by Florin Wheel. and dad of Bramrad.

Our staff includes Lulu Miller, Jonathan Mitchell, Ellen Horn, Amanda Aronzic, and Jessica Benko. With help from Sally Hership, Anna Boyko, Weirot, Ike, Rich Kandaraj. Special thanks to David Sharon, Carrie Donahue, Delisori, and Aaron Sand, Stacey, Abramson, and the Facing History School.

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