In the United States over the last two decades, a diverse set of advocates, experts, and policy makers have sought to reform medical research by making it more inclusive -- principally by including more women, racial and ethnic minorities, children, and the elderly as research subjects, and by testing for outcome differences across categories such as sex, gender, race, ethnicity, and age.

In this presentation, Dr. Epstein describes how this distinctive way of thinking about bodies, identities, and differences gained supporters, took institutional form as law and policy, and become converted into common sense. He also considers some of its many consequences (intended and otherwise) for biomedical research, recruitment of human subjects, "profiling" practices in health care, and scientific and cultural understandings of the meanings of sex and race. While defending certain aspects of the "inclusion-and-difference paradigm," he argues that its emphasis on understanding group differences in biological terms makes it a problematic tool for addressing health inequalities.