It is truly a bold concept — to recruit 1% of the UK population into a massive cohort study — but, 1000 days into the project, not a single participant had been enrolled
Over 5 years ago leading minds within the Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council (MRC) realised that charting the entire genome of one human would do nothing to improve health. They argued that the real meaning and significance of genes could only be unravelled by also studying their owners’ behaviours and environments to determine which combinations conferred resilience and which resulted in disease. And so the idea of the UK Biobank was born.
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Two of us (K J and D P W) are members of Regional Collaborating Centres of UK Biobank and are bound by confidentiality agreements that preclude disclosure of certain documents relating to the project. However, the information in this article is all on UK Biobank’s website: www.biobank.ac.uk