National Genomics: The Forging of the Mestizo Genome

Presented By:

Carlos Lopez Beltran, Ph.D.

Professor, Instituto de investigaciones Filosoficas

National University of Mexico (UNAM)

Abstract

In May 2009, the Mexican Institute of Genomic Medicine made public its achievement of the first draft of what it called The Mexican Mestizo Genome. This talk traces the trajectories followed by the Mexican Mestizo Genome Project from the initial steps immediately after the foundation of INMEGEN in 2004 to the May 11, 2009 ritual delivery to Mexican president Calderón. It asks for the conditions that lead to the production within medical genomic project of a powerful nationalist, racialized discourse that exploits preconceived or “ready-made”, engrained identitary ideological notions of the Mexican as essentially being Mestizo. It asks the question of how and why a project within a new highly promising medical research institution that has a set of moderately well defined medical goals within the field of medical genomics immerses itself in a series of historical and anthropological questions having to do with the apportioning of racial and geographic ancestry. The core notion of Mexican ideological disguising of racial and ethnic conflict is the Mestizo. How this powerful resource was moved into the genomic laboratories is a question Dr. Lopez Beltran explores.