PubMed Health⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

Morris W Foster

Publications and source records attributed to Morris W Foster.

11 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

Investments in cancer genomics: who benefits and who decides.

The Cancer Genome Atlas--formerly the Human Cancer Genome Project--provides an opportunity for considering how social concerns about resource allocation are interrelated with practical decisions about specific research strategies--part of a continuing convergence between scientific and public evaluations of priorities for biomedical research funding. For example, the manner, order, and extent that The Cancer Genome Atlas selects tumor types and populations to be sampled will determine who benefits most from its findings. Those choices will be determined on the basis of both scientific and social values. By soliciting public involvement and conducting rigorous policy analysis in the design of large scientific projects such as The Cancer Genome Atlas, cancer researchers can help democratize the allocation of scientific resources and foster public confidence in biomedical research.

Atlases as Topic↗
PubMed2006

Ethical issues in medical-sequencing research: implications of genotype-phenotype studies for individuals and populations.

Advances and declining costs in sequencing technology will result in increasing number of studies with individual sequence data linked to phenotypic information, which has been dubbed medical sequencing. At least some of this linked information will be publicly available. Medical sequencing raises ethical issues for both individuals and populations, including data release and identifiability, adequacy of consent, reporting research results, stereotyping and stigmatization, inclusion and differential benefit and culturally and community-specific concerns. Those issues are reviewed, along with possible solutions to them.

Ethics, Medical↗
PubMed2006

Analyzing the use of race and ethnicity in biomedical research from a local community perspective.

Lost in the debate over the use of racial and ethnic categories in biomedical research is community-level analysis of how these categories function and influence health. Such analysis offers a powerful critique of national and transnational categories usually used in biomedical research such as "African-American" and "Native American." Ethnographic research on local African-American and Native American communities in Oklahoma shows the importance of community-level analysis. Local ("intra-community") health practices tend to be shared by members of an everyday interactional community without regard to racial or ethnic identity. Externally created ("extra-community") practices tend to be based on the existence of externally-imposed racial or ethnic identities, but African-American and Native American community members show similar patterns in their use of extra-community practices. Thus, membership in an interactional community seems more important than externally-imposed racial or ethnic identity in determining local health practices, while class may be as or more important in accounting for extra-community practices.

Black or African American↗
PubMed2005

Will investments in large-scale prospective cohorts and biobanks limit our ability to discover weaker, less common genetic and environmental contributors to complex diseases?

Increasing the size of prospective cohorts and biobanks is one approach to discovering previously unknown contributors to complex diseases, but it may come at the price of concealing contributors that are less common across all the participants in those larger studies and of limiting hypothesis generation. Prospective cohorts and biobanks constitute significant, long-term investments in research infrastructure that will have ongoing consequences for opportunities in biomedical research for the foreseeable future. Thus, it is important to think about how these major additions to research infrastructure can be designed to be more productive in generating hypotheses for novel environmental contributors to complex diseases and to help identify genetic and environmental contributors that may not be common across the larger samples but are more frequent within local or ancestral subsets. Incorporating open-ended inquiries and qualitative information about local communal and ecologic contexts and the political, economic, and other social structures that affect health status and outcome will enable qualitative hypothesis generation in those localized contexts, as well as the collection of more detailed genealogic and family health history information that may be useful in designing future studies. Using communities as building blocks for larger cohorts and biobanks presents some practical and ethical challenges but also enhances opportunities for interdisciplinary, multilevel investigations of the multifactorial contributors to complex diseases.

Disease↗
PubMed2004

Genetic signatures of pre-expansion bottleneck in the Choctaw population of Oklahoma.

Previous research showed that the Choctaw Indians of Oklahoma exhibit considerable linkage disequilibria (LD) in a number of regions of the genome that has allowed genetic fine mapping for potential susceptibility genes for the autoimmune connective tissue disease scleroderma, or systemic sclerosis (SSc). In principle, such enhanced background LD in the Choctaws could be caused by population bottleneck event(s) followed by recent population expansion. This investigation utilizes genome-scan data on 175 dinucleotide loci from 76 Choctaw individuals to seek genetic evidence of the demographic history of the Choctaw Nation. Of the 175 loci examined, 105 are in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. The average unbiased homozygosity over the 105 loci for the Choctaws (29.3%) is significantly higher than that in the European descent group (20.9%); and when adjusted for sample-size differences, the Choctaw also exhibit a significantly smaller number of segregating alleles (6.65 vs. 8.14) at these loci. Both of these observations are consistent with the trend expected in an isolated population. Comparison of the allele size variance and gene diversity yields an imbalance index (lnbeta) of 0.811 in the Choctaw. Of the 105 loci examined, 93 exhibit excess expected homozygosity in comparison to the expectations of a stepwise mutation model in a population of constant size. Taken together, these observations are consistent with a signature of the recent population size expansion of the Choctaws, preceded by bottleneck event(s).

Female↗
PubMed2004

Beyond race: towards a whole-genome perspective on human populations and genetic variation.

The renewed emphasis on population-specific genetic variation, exemplified most prominently by the International HapMap Project, is complicated by a longstanding, uncritical reliance on existing population categories in genetic research. Race and other pre-existing population definitions (ethnicity, religion, language, nationality, culture and so on) tend to be contentious concepts that have polarized discussions about the ethics and science of research into population-specific human genetic variation. By contrast, a broader consideration of the multiple historical sources of genetic variation provides a whole-genome perspective on the ways i n which existing population definitions do, and do not, account for how genetic variation is distributed among individuals. Although genetics will continue to rely on analytical tools that make use of particular population histories, it is important to interpret findings in a broader genomic context.

Genetic Variation↗
PubMed2003

A practice approach for identifying previously unsuspected environmental contributors to systemic lupus erythematosus and other complex diseases.

Existing medical records and health surveys provide insights into potential environmental contributors to complex chronic diseases. Those recognizable risks (e.g., workplace exposures and behaviors including smoking) do not, however, exhaust the domain of potential environmental contributors. Qualitative ethnographic investigation can be used to generate statistically testable hypotheses about environmental contributors to complex disease that otherwise would not be recognized as such. Consequently, we can empirically specify lifestyle beliefs and behaviors usually summarized by proxy identities such as race, ethnicity, gender, class, and culture. The investigation of potential environmental contributors to complex diseases may be particularly useful in confirming or disconfirming suggestive or established linkages and for indicating the kind of gene-environment interaction that may be involved.

Environmental Exposure↗
PubMed2002

Race, ethnicity, and genomics: social classifications as proxies of biological heterogeneity.

Over the past century, genetics has experienced a tension between the view that racial and ethnic categories are biologically meaningful and the view that these social classifications have little or no biological significance. That tension continues to inform genomics and is evident in the assembly of biological collections and sequence databases that seek to approximate the genetic variation found in human populations. Although social identities can be useful and convenient proxies of some biological features, for example, in ensuring that genomic resources capture a range of genetic variants found in most human populations, the ways in which geneticists conceptualize the relationship between racial and ethnic identities and genetic variation can be problematic. Inclusion of racial and ethnic identifiers in genomic resources can create risks for all members of those identified populations and influence lay perceptions of the nature of racial and ethnic groups. Thus, the burden of showing the scientific utility of racial and ethic identities in the construction and analysis of genomic resources falls on researchers. This requires that genetic researchers pay as much attention to the social constitution of human populations as presently is paid to their genetic composition.

Ethnicity↗
PubMed2002

Community involvement in the ethical review of genetic research: lessons from American Indian and Alaska Native populations.

The National Bioethics Advisory Commission has proposed that regulatory oversight for research with human subjects be extended beyond the protection of individual research participants to include the protection of social groups. To accomplish this, the commission recommends that investigators and ethics review boards a) work directly with community representatives to develop study methods that minimize potential group harms, b) discuss group implications as part of the informed consent process, and c) consider group harms in reporting research results. We examine the utility of these recommendations in the context of research with American Indian and Alaska Native communities. Because much attention has been given to the question of how best to consult with members of these communities in the design and conduct of research, we believe it behooves investigators to consider the lessons to be learned from research involving American Indians and Alaska Natives. After describing several difficulties surrounding the application of the commission's approach to these research contexts, we propose a research agenda to develop best practices for working with local communities in the ethical assessment of epidemiologic and environmental health research.

Alaska↗
PubMed2002

An analysis of research guidelines on the collection and use of human biological materials from American Indian and Alaskan Native communities.

American Indian and Alaskan Native communities have expressed concern about the use of human biological materials in research. These concerns have prompted research sponsors and professional organizations to develop guidelines for investigators working with these communities. This paper reviews research guidelines and presents recommendations that reflect "best practices" for working with North American indigenous communities in the collection, storage, and distribution of human biological materials for research. These recommendations strike a reasonable balance between three imperatives in research: (1) minimizing harm, (2) treating sample contributors with respect, and (3) promoting intellectual freedom to pursue a range of research questions. The recommendations can be used in designing appropriate methods of collecting and using human biological materials from members of American Indian and Alaskan Native communities and will likely be applicable to other historically disadvantaged communities as well.

Biological Specimen Banks↗