Free Republic

In 2003, the anthropologist Duana Fullwiley spent six months observing a team of biomedical research scientists. The team wanted to find out whether genetic variation could affect how different people respond to drugs, and to do so, they recruited a group of racially and ethnically diverse research subjects. They were a diverse team themselves, with good intentions to address a worthy problem—it’s well known that different races suffer from health problems at different rates and can respond differently to treatments. If they could trace these discrepancies to genetic differences between races, the team reasoned, they could explain, and perhaps start...

"THE SUCCESS of our country depends upon helping newcomers assimilate into our society, and embrace our common identity as Americans," President Bush declared Monday in his Oval Office address on immigration reform. "English allows newcomers to go from picking crops to opening a grocery, from cleaning offices to running offices, from a life of low-paying jobs to a diploma, a career and a home of their own." As the son of legal Costa Rican immigrants whose mother learned English, taught in the Los Angeles City Schools and earned a master's degree from Pepperdine University, I found the President's words pertinent,...