[Millennium]

It seems that the FDA has approved BiDil, a new heart medication which is supposed to be specifically for blacks. This would not bother me, except that when you dig deeper, it seems that no significant effort has been made in testing the drug on any other race; although the company has vaguely alluded that it might not, it hasn't performed any extensive studies one way or the other. Furthermore, it appears to be opposing any attempts to make it study the effects on other races.

In other words, the race-specificity of the drug appears to be a matter of marketing, not science. Thoughts? Should a drug be approved and released before it has been exhaustively tested on a more representative sampling of humanity in general? Although such things as this certainly occurred decades ago, when many drugs were tested on only whites, haven't we moved to the point where we can and should start mandating more thorough testing?

[von Wrangell]

They did multi-racial test(normal random tests) and the results were non-existant for Caucasians while the results for African-Americans were very encouraging.

But I'm glad we are turning more towards accepting that we are different and that different drugs might have different effects on different races. It is already known for certain medicines that they aren't effective or have various side-effects for certain races.(yes, I was bored and went through the national drug library a while ago.)