---------- From: Ken Brown[SMTP:k.brown@ccs.bbk.ac.uk] David Honig wrote:
[...]
Some scandanavian countries have complete health records on all their citizens and some are working on national DNA banks. Some of these will be made available for research after some form of anonymization.
For values of "some" which are in the set of all nation-states known as "Iceland". There is a lot of controversy about it over there (see various news reports in Scientific American, Nature, New Scientist et.c over the past couple of years). AFAIK it is going ahead.
The point about Iceland is that almost all the population is descended from a comparatively small number of Norse (& even fewer Irish) colonists in historical times & they keep good births-marriages-and-deaths records. So their traditional genetics is well-known & some quite deep family histories are retrievable. So the DNA data can maybe be matched with that to produce lots of interesting test cases about hereditary diseases.
Ken Brown
Assuming, of course, that the birth records accurately reflect parentage. If you take a course in human genetics you're likely to be astonished at the rate of fooling around that must occur to account for the appearence of traits within families - I've heard that as high as 10% of firstborns must have had a father different than the one on the birth certificate (no, I can't give you a cite). Peter