This ongoing project follows 500,000 volunteers who were recruited between 2006 and 2010.
It includes:
🔴 Genetic Data: The entire genomes of all 500,000 participants have been sequenced
🔴 Biological Samples: Over 15 million samples of blood, urine, and saliva were collected.
🔴 Physical Measurements: Height, Weight, Body fat, Waist/Hip Circumference, ECG, blood pressure of all 500,000 participants were collected.
🔴 Medical Records: The Biobank is linked to participants’ NHS records, tracking doctor visits and hospital visits
🔴 Lifestyle Information: Data about diet, sleep, mental health is collected through individual questionnaires.
The 500,000 volunteers agreed to have their health tracked by the project for 30 years.
All data is free, open source, and “de-identified” meaning names are removed.
The UK Biobank is used by scientists to study genetic and lifestyle causes of diseases. More than 20,000 researchers from 90 different countries registered to use it.
(Some people are actually worried about that)
Using this data, scientists keep finding interesting things :
https://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk/research-stories/flu-and-covid-19-can-reignite-dormant-breast-cancer/
This is a super interesting project.
Thank you Britain 🇬🇧 🫡
As others have already answered, you share DNA with relatives. Anonymisation is certainly good, but I wonder how well it works with something so inherently personal.
Some areas are conserved quite well, so you can infer the degree of kinship quite well. Another aspect is that imo one of the dystopian uses of DNA is for health insurance. And for that you wouldn’t necessarily need to know whether someone has a certain gene or not. It would probably be good enough to work with probabilities, if you know someone else in the family has a certain gene.
But I am probably pessimistic here, because of course there is tremendous value for research here.
Fortunately, health insurance isn’t a concern because it’s not really a thing here in the UK.