CDR: Re: why should it be trusted?
Trei, Peter
ptrei at rsasecurity.com
Thu Oct 19 09:19:20 PDT 2000
> ----------
> 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
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