Race and ethnicity in the era of emerging pharmacogenomics.

Race and ethnicity are terms that are commonly used to categorize subjects in medical research. Advances in genetics and the emerging discipline of pharmacogenomics have brought these terms under scrutiny, with arguments either for the continued use or for the abandonment of these terms generating strong views. As pharmacogenomics research develops, we may find that more accurate and specific descriptions of relevant variation in genes will reduce the value that these imprecise descriptors have in predicting how people will respond to drug therapies.