‘All of Us’ genetics chart stirs unease over controversial depiction of race

Some geneticists have expressed their unease about a figure in a high-profile Nature paper that was published earlier this week¹, noting that it could be misinterpreted as reinforcing racist beliefs. The figure has reignited a long-standing debate among geneticists about how best to discuss and depict race, ethnicity and genomic ancestry, given how these terms can be misinterpreted and weaponized by extremists.

Alexander Bick, a physician and geneticist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, who co-authored the paper in which the figure appears, acknowledged in an e-mail to Nature’s news team that “it’s clear that the figure fell short of our intended goal for this paper”. (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its journal team.) But Bick defended the analysis, noting...