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The emergence of BiDil® as the first medication approved and marketed for treating specific racial and ethnic groups raises many crucial questions for medicine and society. Do the causes of disease vary significantly between different racial and ethnic groups? Should other group-specific medications be developed? Should treatment decisions be based on the race and ethnicity of patients? Many of these questions reflect old tensions in medicine, made newly relevant by growing concerns with health disparities, the advent of genetic technology, and the intensification of pharmaceutical marketing. This conference brings together scholars from many fields -- medicine, history, anthropology, nursing, sociology, STS, genetics, public health, business, African-American studies, ethics, and law -- to discuss the promise and pitfalls of the new racial therapeutics in medicine.