‘All of this study of genotypes will have profound consequences on ourunderstanding of race and ethnicity’, Francis Collins, Director of theNational Human Genome Research Institute, warned his colleagues in 2003. AtBioSocieties, we have been committed tobringing the perspectives of the social sciences to bear on the charged issues athand. In September 2006 (Vol. 1, Part 3), we published our first forum on race andgenomics, where we focused on larger questions raised by the decision of Nature Genetics to publish a special open-accesssupplement—Genetics for the HumanRace—in November 2004, concerned with the topic of humangenome variation and the continuing validity of the concept of‘race’. In the forum, sociologist Andrew Smart and colleaguesanalysed the contributions to that supplement, as well as interview material fromthe three editors behind it, to tease out the larger methodological, scientific andethical dilemmas that scientists in the thick of genomics and race researchperceived themselves to face. Charmaine D.M. Royal, one of the contributors toGenetics for the Human Race, then respondedto the issues raised by Smart and colleagues.