Sweetness in the Blood Audiobook By James Doucet-Battle cover art

Sweetness in the Blood

Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes

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Sweetness in the Blood

By: James Doucet-Battle
Narrated by: Terrence Kidd
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About this listen

Decades of data cannot be ignored: African-American adults are far more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes than white adults. But has science gone so far in racializing diabetes as to undermine the search for solutions? In a rousing indictment of the idea that notions of biological race should drive scientific inquiry, Sweetness in the Blood provides an ethnographic picture of biotechnology's framings of Type 2 diabetes risk and race and, importantly, offers a critical examination of the assumptions behind the recruitment of African American and African-descent populations for Type 2 diabetes research.

James Doucet-Battle begins with a historical overview of how diabetes has been researched and framed racially over the past century, chronicling one company's efforts to recruit African Americans to test their new diabetes risk-score algorithm with the aim of increasing the clinical and market value of the firm's technology. He considers African-American reticence about participation in biomedical research and examines race and health disparities in light of advances in genomic sequencing technology. He concludes by emphasizing that genomic research into sub-Saharan ancestry in fact underlines the importance of analyzing gender before attempting to understand the notion of race. No disease reveals this more than Type 2 diabetes.

©2021 the Regents of the University of Minnesota (P)2021 Tantor
History & Commentary Medicine & Health Care Industry Physical Illness & Disease Racism & Discrimination Social Sciences Discrimination Medicine Thought-Provoking Social justice Health care
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I was disappointed with the narration. This is dense, wordy material. Strange pauses in the middle of sentences and mispronounce words ("specicifity" and "dia SPOR a," especially) failed to aid understanding.

Dense material. Narration didn't help

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