Estonia, a country of 1.5 million in Northern Europe, launches a project building a national health and DNA database (see Science, Oct. 6 2000, Nature Biotech Nov 2000). This database will bring direct benefits to the Estonian people and to their healthcare. In addition to that, at the global level, it will offer a tremendously valuable tool for datamining to find disease susceptibility markers or disease genes. Above all, these databases could serve as an example of emerging foundations of the future personalized medicine through the use of information and gene technologies in the healthcare. I would like to introduce you the project, the legal, ethical and educational homework that has been done during the past one and a half years. Furthermore, I would like to draw your attention to technological requirements concerning information technology (incl. Databases) and genotyping that still need to addressed to make a full use of that information. http://www-smi.stanford.edu/events/abstracts/abstract_2000111393000563.html