Uses and abuses of the concept of race in genomics of sport performance and sport-related traumatic brain injury: epistemological and ethical considerations

ABSTRACT

In this article, we tackle the epistemological and ethical issues related to the use of race concepts in the genomics of sport performance and sport-related concussion (SRC). In the first part of the article, we show how the concept of race is ubiquitous in scientific literature, besides the fact that ‘race’ as other analogous population descriptors like ‘ancestry’ and ‘continent’ carry ancestral genetic heterogeneity and therefore they cannot be used to infer any kind of genetic or physiological property. Then, we investigate the question of whether genomics research focusing on racial categories and race-specific genes of sport performance and of risk of health outcomes due to repetitive head impacts (RHI) is justified from an epistemological point of view, arguing that it is not; we show that the evidence supporting the existence of genetic variants determining an elite athlete status or a predisposition to health outcomes after SRC is scarce, and the use of racial categories (e.g. African or Black, Caucasian or White, Asian, etc.) as proxies for genetic variants associated with an elite athlete status/a predisposition to health outcomes after SRC is ill-conceived. In the second part of the article, we analyze the main ethical issues concerning the reification of race concepts in sport genomics, also considering the more general issue of the ethical and social impact of the use of a genetic framework in the explanation of individual differences in sport performance and SRC.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• genomics
• brain injury
• sport
• ethics

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to the participants of the joint European Association for Philosophy of Sport and British Philosophy of Sport Association conference in Leuven in 2023, and to the participants of the seminar series of the Research Center for Knowledge in Cognition of the University of Bologna in January 2024 for their feedback. We are grateful to the editors of the special issues for their comments which improved the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For a recent analysis on the use of race categories in biomedical research, see (Malinowska and Żuradzki 2023).

2. In the scientific literature, the label ‘ancestry’ is often considered a good population descriptor—in the sense of being more objective and less objectionable than race or ethnicity; however, it has been shown many times by population geneticists that it is far from being a scientifically valid label, representing an ambiguous concept (Dauda et al. 2023).

Additional information

Funding

Camporesi’s research was funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (PRIN 2022SYAW7A).