One million people will be donating their blood samples and their personal information about their lifestyle, diet, habit and their disease information to one of the two biggest medical research projects, the British Project called Biobank or the American Project. The American project is still in its infancy and the Biobank would be started very soon.
The Project would be collecting blood samples and your personal lifestyle information and they would help in early identification of diseases before they strike you which is mostly influenced by your genes which is detected by the blood sample given by you and the other diseases which is caused by environment and your food style which is detected by the personal information given by you.The critics of the project feel that they project would lead to sharing of personal information which may lead to leak of these information causing social stigma, recruits may give vague or wrong data which could lead to wrong diagnosis of disease or a doctor would have misinterpreted a diagnosis leading to a different wrong result from the project database to overcome this problem the project organizers have planned to insert Biochip to the recruit which constantly monitors the body temperature, pressure, heart beat, oxygen exchange, alcohol and tobacco intake, radiation exposure and transmits the data to the project organizers.
Biobank on the issue of maintaining the confidentiality of information collected from recruits had said that they would be encrypting the data in a way the details are stored secretly with a PIN number to avoid leaking of data. The Biobank project is funded with £61 million, which will be jointly funded by UK Medical Research council, Wellcome Trust and the Government Health Ministry.
Source: The Newscientist
