CDR: Re: why should it be trusted?

[Ken Brown]

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