Conference April 7-8, 2006, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston Massachusetts

Submission deadline: October 1st, 2005

The emergence of BiDil® as potentially the first medication approved and marketed for treating specific racial and ethnic groups raises many crucial questions for medicine and society. Do the causes of diseases vary significantly between different racial and ethnic groups? Can group-specific medications be developed? Should treatment decisions be based on the race and ethnicity of patients? Many of these questions reflect old tensions in medicine, made newly relevant by growing concern with health disparities, the advent of genetic technology, and the intensification of pharmaceutical marketing. This conference will bring together scholars from many fields -- medicine, pharmacology, history, anthropology, sociology, STS, genetics, business, ethics, and law -- to discuss the promise and pitfalls of the new racial therapeutics in medicine.

Abstracts (300 words or less) should be submitted by October 1st, to:

David S. Jones
Program in Science Technology and Society
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue, E51-185
Cambridge, MA 02139
dsjones@mit.edu (email submissions are welcomed)