Among the writing guidelines outlined in the JAMA paper are warnings not to use racial or ethnic data as a proxy for genetic variation and to consider the effect of socioeconomic status and similar factors before comparing racial groups.

In the June 13 issue of Science (here), Floyd Bloom, M.D., Ph.D., predicts the “imminent collapse of the American health system” unless radical change begins soon. Building off his presidential address at the AAAS annual meeting earlier this year (see HABIT, Feb. 25, 2003, at http://www.cfah.org/habit/vol6no2/), Bloom calls for a new federal commission to look at how the health care system could be overhauled to ensure that biomedical discoveries are turned into meaningful health advances.

Finally, a story in the June 5 issue of Nature (here; free access) by evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond, Ph.D., looks at why Europeans have largely escaped the global epidemic of type 2 diabetes. Diamond suggests that many populations around the world have a genetic predisposition to diabetes that has been awakened by the Western “coca-colonization” lifestyle. These populations were predisposed to diabetes by waves of food shortages that helped select for calorie-collecting genes, says Diamond, who suggests that Europeans have not experienced similar shortages in recent history.