Grand Rounds: Inheritance & Health: What Really Matters for Health Equity? – Considering History, Jim Crow, and Racialized Economic Segregation

Inheritance & Health: What Really Matters for HealthEquity? – Considering History, Jim Crow, and Racialized Economic Segregation

Nancy Krieger, PhD

Professor of Social Epidemiology

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

What type of inheritance truly matters for the people’shealth? This question gains new urgency as genomics and precision medicine takecenter stagein US biomedicine, taxes for corporations and the wealthy areslashed, regulations and programs to protect the environment and public healthare undermined, and racism and coddling of white supremacy are evident at thehighest levels of the US government. Guidance is perhaps surprisingly offeredby the work of Wilhelm Johannsen, who in 1909 coined the terms “gene,”“genotype,” and “phenotype.” He was worried that biologists’ uncritical use ofthe term “inheritance” would become conflated with what he termed its “everyday” meaning, i.e., “the `transmission’ of money or things, rights or duties –or even ideas and knowledge – from one person to another or to some others: the`heirs’ or `inheritors.’” Johannsen was right to worry. For publichealth, thedecidedly non-biological type of inheritance is key – and is getting shortshrift. As history shows, societal regulation and restriction of massiveconcentrations of private inheritance, along with promotion of publicinheritance and support for shared and inclusive knowledge, is what bestenables societies to improve population health and promote health equity. Tounderscore this point, empirical examples will be provided regarding: (1) thehealth impacts of spatial social and economic polarization on health, asquantified using the Index of Concentration at the Extremes, and (2) thebeneficial impact of the abolition of Jim Crow, its embodied legacy incontemporary health inequities, and new initiatives tackling structural racismto promote equity, including health equity.

Nancy Krieger is Professor of Social Epidemiology andAmerican Cancer Society Clinical Research Professor at the Harvard T.H. ChanSchool of Public Health (HSPH) and Director of the HSPH InterdisciplinaryConcentration on Women, Gender, and Health. She is an internationallyrecognized social epidemiologist (PhD, Epidemiology, UC Berkeley, 1989), with abackground in biochemistry, philosophy of science, and history of publichealth, plus 30+ years of activism involving social justice, science, andhealth. She is an ISI highly cited scientist (since 2004; reaffirmed: 2015), agroup comprising ‚Äúless than one-half of one percent of all publishingresearchers.‚Äù Dr. Krieger‚Äôs work addresses: (1) conceptual frameworks tounderstand, analyze, and improve the people‚Äôs health, including the ecosocialtheory of disease distribution she first proposed in 1994, concerned withembodiment and equity; (2) etiologic research on societal determinants ofpopulation health and health inequities;and (3) methodologic research onimproving monitoring of health inequities. 

Wed, April 18, 2018

4:00 PM – 5:30 PM EDT

 CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy55 West 125th Street

Room 708

New York, NY 10027