Member Spotlight: Jonathan Kahn In his new book Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age, ASLME member Jonathan Kahn examines the role of race in biomedicine, using the drug BiDil as a case study.
In 2005, the FDA approved BiDil to treat heart failure in African Americans -- the first drug to be labeled for a specific racial group. In the book, Kahn examines the events surrounding the creation of BiDil, exposing how marketing incentives and legal mandates rather than medical evidence played primary roles in developing the drug as a race-specific medication. He argues that these same forces have come to act more broadly in driving the growing use of race in biomedicine beyond BiDil.
Dr. Kahn is an internationally recognized expert exploring issues that lie at the intersections of law, health and racial justice. He has published in a variety of journals including the Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law & Ethics, the Iowa Law Review, the Stanford Law & Policy Journal, Health Affairs, The American Journal of Public Health, and Nature Genetics.
Since joining in 2005, Kahn has been an active member of the Society. His article “The Troubling Persistence of Race in Pharmacogenomics” was published in the Winter 2012 issue of JLME, and he will be presenting at ASLME’s 36th Annual Health Law Professors Conference at Seton Hall this June.
Kahn is a professor of law at Hamline University School of Law, where he teaches Constitutional Law, Torts, Health Law and Bioethics. Kahn has received grants from the National Human Genome Research Institute, the National Library of Medicine, and the National Endowment for the Humanities to fund his scholarly research.
Kahn earned a Ph.D. in U.S. History from Cornell University and a J.D. from the Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley.
Race in a Bottle is published by Columbia University Press and is currently available for purchase.
