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Transcript: Ralph Forquera


[Forquera:]
Or whether the benefits that would be derived from doing genetic work might be overcome by the social and the economic and the other variables, which are also concerns of other populations as well as the Native population. I really don’t know how—you know, the Native people that I’ve talked to about it tend to be people who are more educated and are much more aware of both the benefits and the consequences of what’s going on in genetic research. So they tend to probably be a little bit more open-minded about it than a person who doesn’t have as much of an orientation towards that kind of stuff. But I think it’s important—and I told this to Dr. Collins and he was very cognizant of it—that we be very cautious in how we do this kind of work, that if we have to we over-educate, we over-compensate, we take extraordinary means to assure that we don’t misuse this tremendously powerful thing. We are still struggling with access, so when you start talking about things like genetic research, or you start talking about things like even open heart surgery, or some of these really advanced technological or innovative scientific discoveries and medical treatments, the likelihood of it getting to a population like ours is decades away until we fix the bigger health care problem, so that access becomes less of an obstacle than it is.