Thursday, 11 September 2008
Several large research institutions have withdrawn genetic information from the internet after they learned that a new technique could spot an individual’s DNA profile even in a databank of more than 1000 people.

"In other words," says the US National Institutes of Health, "bioinformatics techniques have progressed to the point that with enough genomic data on an individual from another source, it is now possible to determine whether that individual participated in a study by analysing only the pooled summary data."

The problem is that participants in "genome-wide association" studies who volunteered their genetic information so that scientists could investigate diseases have been told that their personal information could not be identified. Since this is no longer the case, the databases have been withdrawn from the web. ~ NIH, Aug 28; New Scientist, Sept 1