Paper short abstract:

This paper attempts to contribute to this growing body of literature on the problematic and fluid construction of reference populations in genome medicine by raising the question of “why the interest in ‘Asians,’ what is at stake and ‘who is an Asian’?”

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on documentary analysis and interviews with leading human geneticists and medical oncologists in Singapore, a multi-ethnic country in Asia, this paper suggests that the construction of the reference groups are simultaneously shaped by a particular configuration of global forces and local histories. Specifically, on the one hand, the category is "racialized" ("Asianized") primarily because (1) the prospective and growing drug markets in Asia and the national government's push to build a world-class bio-medical industry, (2) the dominance of genome science publications in the US, and (3) the efforts on the part of some researchers to use race-as-a-signpost to uncover the molecular basis of disease and drug responses.

On the other hand, ethnic categorization is also a salient feature in study designs and research reports mainly because the notion of "Asian" is mostly interpreted as the combination of local ethnic categories -- Chinese, Indians and Malays. These categories are a legacy of British colonial governance, but currently defined variously by scientists based on the human subjects' names, and/or the designation of "race" on their National Registration Identity Cards (NRIC), and the interest on the part of researchers and policy-makers to assess the prevalence of particular molecular biomarkers in the local population. Taken together, these findings illustrate the centrality and interconnectedness of highly variable definitions of race and ethnicity in the development of genome-based medicine, but which all clinicians in this study say should ideally be implemented based on the genetic information of the individual patient without regards to his/her racial and ethnic background.