History
In the late 1990s deCODE proposed to create the world's first population-wide genomic biobank by collecting data from the entire population of Iceland, which numbered 270,000 at the time. The plan had these three major components: creating a genealogical database, collecting biobank specimens by means of which genotyping could be done, and creating a national electronic health record system to connect genetic data to each individual's phenotype.
In December 1998 with lobbying from deCODE, the Icelandic Parliament passed the Act on Health Sector Database which permitted public bidding for the right of a company to create this health database and use it for various purposes. The parliament shortly thereafter granted deCODE the right to create this database after the company made a successful bid to do so.
Read more about this topic: DeCODE Genetics
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“The history of his present majesty, is a history of unremitting injuries and usurpations ... all of which have in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world, for the truth of which we pledge a faith yet unsullied by falsehood.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)