Where Biology Ends and Bias Begins: Lessons on Belonging From Our DNA

Shoumita Dasgupta
University of California Press, £25.00

With its provocative and challenging title, readers will sense that the author – who was born in South Asia, moved with her parents to the US as a child and is now a professor of medicine at Boston University – will pull no punches. 

Some recently invented phrases, such as ‘selfish genes’ and ‘it’s in his/her DNA’, have become incorporated with undue facility into familiar day-to-day language, which the author claims has unwittingly distorted the world views of many, including scientists, to detrimental effect. 

Many such consequences are attributable to the misconception of ‘genetic essentialism’, a term that erroneously assumes that DNA, on its own, is responsible for determining fundamental features of our personal characteristics and susceptibility to diseases. The result is that hierarchies of harmful stereotypes between identity groups (based, for example, on race, gender and abilities) have been set up, despite environmental, societal and epigenetic influences often playing crucial roles. 

What is especially impressive is the interdisciplinary scope of the analyses, which encompasses anthropological, sociological, moral and legal concerns concerning race, ethnicity, reproductive justice, disability, contemporary eugenics, genetic privacy, and race-based medicine, to name a few. 

Despite the breadth of the approach, the individual issues considered are addressed with remarkable clarity and insight, and applied to several hitherto largely unrecognised questions of moral, legal, political and medical significance.

In addressing genetics at population, molecular and clinical levels, the author seeks to provide a reassessment of where ‘biology ends and bias begins’ and to set an agenda for rectifying the ingenuous misapprehensions that restrict bioethical progress.  

Professor Ben Mepham FRSB

Shoumita Dasgupta is a geneticist and internationally recognised anti-racism educator. She is a Professor of Medicine and an Assistant Dean of Diversity & Inclusion at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine as well as a US Department of State Fulbright Specialist