The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 268 No 7181 p72
19 January 2002

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Race and culture [more]
Back to Troy [more]
Safer therapy [more]

Race and culture

A race has been defined as "a group of persons, animals or plants connected by common descent or origin; a tribe, nation or people regarded as of common stock; or a group of several tribes or peoples forming a distinct ethnical stock". A culture, in distinction, is "a trained and defined state of the understanding and manners and tastes, or of the body".

Thus, we may regard race as something out of our control, whereas a culture depends upon a chosen discipline, even though it may have been chosen centuries ago. In either case, we are essentially denied the ability to divest ourselves of the heritage, biological or social. Any discrimination based on differences of race or culture is therefore quite unjustified. Yet it continues and at times flares up. In facing such discrimination we should remember the dictum of the historian H. A. L. Fisher in his 'History of Europe' (1936): "Purity of race does not exist. Europe is a continent of energetic mongrels".

The cult of racism reaches back beyond the 15th century, but did not become notorious until the 1930s when it was adopted as a pseudoscientific concept for political purposes. Among the ancient Greeks and Romans different ethnic groups were not assigned superiority or inferiority on the basis of their body type. Aristotle recognised in the third century BC that skin pigmentation, an obvious difference between individuals of different races, was a biological inheritance, but some of his contemporaries considered that environment was the essential cultural determinant. The early peoples of India and Iran designated themselves as "Aryans", a distinction related to their languages, but the term came to signify racist characteristics and was replaced by "Indo-Iranian".

It is recognised that we cannot progress towards true justice and equity and truly observe human rights until we have exorcised the notion of racism from our consciousness. Those who are poised to use it for economic or political ends still insist on its claimed biological basis, but this is a myth, no less. It is a social construct that is not scientific. Attempts to develop the pseudoscience known as eugenics to improve the level of the human person acquired much notoriety during the Nazi era in Europe. The system known as Apartheid in South Africa was based on the false doctrine that white individuals held biological and moral supremacy over those with darker skins. It has even been argued that there is a definite relationship between racial characteristics and the abuse and marketing of illicit drugs.

In 1871 the anthropologist Sir Edward Tylor made the suggestion that varieties of culture might be attributed to racial differences in mental endowment. Contradictory notions from students of human nature have governed the application of cultural diversity to educational capacity, and have come to be the bedrock of unhealthy political discrimination and callous exploitation. We must remain on our guard against such developments.

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Back to Troy

Troy is a place of legend, the town to which Paris allegedly carried off Helen, wife of King Menelaus of Sparta, so provoking the Trojan war which made a Greek epic, duly related by Homer. Troy's site, on a hilltop overlooking the junction of the Simois and Scamader rivers, comprises a small citadel mound associated with some 25m of debris from human occupation and overlying a lower settlement of more than 1km square.

The area shows much deeper layers of activity, and has been excavated intermittently by Schliemann between 1870 and 1890, and others, since Charles Maclaren, a geologist, identified it in 1820. Occupation evidence shows a Bronze Age dating of some 3000BC, and later deposits to AD1200.

The Trojan war of 3,250 years ago, when the Greeks besieged the town, is now regarded as not so much a family feud as one in defence of trading interests. Troy offered a protected haven for vessels making the tricky passage between the Aegean and Black Seas by way of the Dardanelles, and was critical for the trade in gold, silver, iron, cinnabar, jade, timber, hemp and linen. The Greek fleet sailed from Tenedos and came within missile-throwing distance of Troy's walls. A certain Protesilaus leapt ashore and slew a few Trojans, until Hector overcame him. The Trojans retreated to their battlements, while the invaders beached their craft and pursued them.

The scene is difficult to recreate today, since the citadel is now some 6km inland, but in ancient times Troy was close to the sea on three sides. According to John Kraft of the University of Delaware, addressing the Geological Society of America recently in Boston, the harbour of Troy stretched 10km inland from its present situation millennia before the historic siege, the shore shifting 3km north by the time the Greeks arrived. There was therefore a stretch of marshes available to the Greeks to beach their craft, under the city walls. Indeed, they could arrange their ships in three ranks, according to the records. The geographer Strabo, writing in the first century BC, confirms these shoreline differences, so that the landing of the Greeks on Trojan soil makes sense in the face of modern geography.

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Safer therapy

It is well recognised that people react in different ways and to different degrees when treated with drugs, and that individuals of different ancestry may show a strange and worrying susceptibility to compounds that produce no undesirable effects in the vast majority.

In the Journal of the American Medical Association for 14 November 200 is a review of research into the choice of drug therapy according to the genetic makeup of the patient being treated. Drugs are metabolised in the body by at least one enzyme that may have a variant allele, and a patient's enzyme nature may lead to a significant incidence of severe adverse reactions that do not occur in other individuals. There is a complex link between such reactions and genetic variability. The modern concept known as "pharmacogenomatics", if properly applied, offers a means of reducing undesirable drug reactions. Clinical tests for specific metabolising enzymes, so far as they are available, might well be used with advantage.

Important determining factors in therapeutics include the prevalence of variant alleles in a population, the extent to which a drug is used to treat that population, the severity of any adverse reactions likely to be encountered, and how well the signs of drug toxicity can be monitored by available technology.

For advances to become possible, genetic tests must be simplified, and clinicians must be able to interpret their findings accurately. Since most drugs depend for their metabolism upon complex pathways, this may not be easy. One future development might well be the drawing up of the genetic profile exhibited by a patient, which could be consulted before a particular drug is prescribed.

An awareness of the compounded problem when two or more drugs are to be prescribed together, involving interaction with the same metabolising enzyme, is an important consideration.

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