Michael Montoya, anthropology and Chicano/Latino Studies associate professor, is the 2013 winner of the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize. The honor, awarded by the British Sociological Association, recognizes Making the Mexican Diabetic: Race, Science and the Genetics of Inequality for making the most significant contribution to medical sociology/sociology of health and illness.  Montoya’s book characterizes how social ideas about racial human difference impact genomic research into chronic diseases. Published in 2011, the ethnographic study follows blood donations from the US/Mexico border to laboratories around the world illuminating how social inequality becomes embedded in genetic sciences. Making the Mexican Diabetic demonstrates that simplistic ideas about good and bad science and scientists do not account for the complex ways ideas about human variation and the practices of scientific research are keyed to social forces in American life.   

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the University of California, Irvine.

Montoya will receive his award at the British Sociological Association annual conference to be held April 23-25, 2014 at the University of Leeds (United Kingdom).