Iceland's Dilemma: Privacy Versus Progress
A small Icelandic startup has been granted a 12-year license to create and manage adatabase of the entire nation's medical and genetic records. Can it make medical history without violating patient privacy?
"[DeCode] took advantage of a very different climate in Iceland about these issues," says Dr. Russ B. Altman, president of the International Society of Computational Biology. "I don’t think a U.S. company could do the same thing, but many companies may form alliances with smaller medical entities, like Kaiser Permanente or another large health-care organization, to assimilate some of this data.
"Ethical issues," Altman concludes, "are paramount in this kind of research."
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