In Australia we often marvel at the political correctness that appears to burden America, like the guy who got the sack for referring to someone as "niggardly", which is a word that, other than phonetically, is completely unrelated to the word "nigger" and means "Grudging and petty in giving or spending."

Or the long standing computing jargon of a "master/slave" configuration being banned in certain computer installations in California because it might offend black Americans. It is tedious and expensive to remove these references but bowing before the god of political correctness is essentially harmless is, in this case.

Now let us turn our attention to a drug called BiDil that was produced by a Massachusetts-based pharmaceutical company NitroMed. It was first trialed in 1980s but was abandoned when it failed to live up to expectations in the treatment of heart failure. The problem is that it is phenonemally efficacious in Black Americans and almost completely useless in White Americans. Sadly the American taboo on suggesting that there are any physiological racial differences between blacks and whites precluded any specific racial testing of the drug, although there were hints from the statistical analysis that these differences did exist.

Anne Taylor of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis has stepped into line of the flame-thrower of public opinion and retested the drug. Testing on 1,000 black heart-failure patients has been shown the drug to be so successful that testing was suspended well ahead of time. With luck the drug will be receive FDA approval in 2005.

This is a case of science bending to the political sensitivities of the community at large and as a consequence a valuable heart treatment has gone unused for 20 years. The pressure on the testers not to distinguish, or factor in, race when testing this drug has cost countless black lives over the last 20 years.

Science must be constrained by ethics but it must be constrained by true ethical practice not by pressure by people and special interest groups with their own agendas to promote.

Read more in Nature.