IS POLITICAL CORRECTNESS holding back medical research? This is an op-ed for a student newspaper so it is short on well-researched conclusions, to put it mildly. But it touches on something important.

The reason doctors do not research [biological] differences as much as they should is because of feminism, said Dr. Doris Taylor, the director of the Center for Cardiovascular Repair at the University of Minnesota . . . If doctors attempt to present research with “sex differences” in their abstract, nobody would allow them to display their findings because it is too politically incorrect, Taylor told “60 Minutes.” . . .

If [researchers] upset too many people [by being politically incorrect], they lose their source of funding. Because men and women truly are different we could tailor medical research to each gender [sic] and even possibly each ethnicity. . . . Conditions could have customized treatments for those who[m] they would most benefit. Imagine a hospital with far lower fatality rates because they could treat a disease specifically to help a black man, a white woman or any other gender [sic] or ethnicity.

It seems that the author has struck a chord. Here is a thoughtful and informative comment in response:

You exhibit an unsettling level of arrogance in your prejudiced ignorance on these issues, especially in this continuous stream of non-factual bile . . . The bullsh*t here runs deeper than can be deciphered in a few comments–for starters, there is no scientific proof of biological difference across different ethnic groups, a fact proven time and time again in science and law since the age of eugenics–your whimsical musing on imagining “a hospital with far lower fatality rates because they could treat a disease specifically to help a black man” is utterly revolting and disturbing.

Way to prove his point. It turns out that, yes, some people do not respond well to someone pointing out differences among groups of humans, even if his purpose is to encourage better health for everyone. Anyway, let’s take a closer look at this claim: “There is no scientific proof of biological difference across different ethnic groups, a fact proven time and time again in science and law.” (Law? I didn’t realize that civil laws could prove ideas about biology.) On the contrary, there are biological differences across different ethnic groups. Skin color and bone structure aren’t socially constructed, for example. And yes, biological differences matter when it comes to medicine.

But this is a touchy matter. See the following remark by David Epstein, author of The Sports Gene:

What would you say is the most controversial topic in the book?
Race, race, race. It almost scared me out of writing the book. I was preparing my resume just in case I got drummed out of the profession. Scientists I interviewed sometimes told me they had data on ethnic differences, but would not publish them, for fear that their physiological work could somehow be construed as supporting the idea of innate intellectual differences, as if the two have anything to do with one another. These are professors with tenure, and they weren’t publishing, and there is no tenure in journalism, so I was concerned. But, as I write in the book, there are cases were ignoring ethnic differences in genes can lead to disastrous medical outcomes, so I felt compelled to write what I had learned.

So, it seems that taking into account racial differences could lead to better medical outcomes, perhaps not as dramatic as “a hospital with far lower fatality rates,” but at least something, because its staff could tailor their treatment “specifically to help a black man.” The very idea, according to the commenter quoted above, “is utterly revolting and disturbing.” This is, we discover, yet another case of reverse reverse bigotry, whereby an ideology of victimization ends up harming the very groups it intends to privilege.