CDR: Re: why should it be trusted?

[Trei, Peter]

> ----------
> From: 	Ken Brown[SMTP:k.brown at 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