Biobank counters critics

The UK Biobank project could cost billions of pounds without producing any useful results, according to Alec Jeffreys, the scientist best known for inventing DNA fingerprinting.In the Daily Telegraph newspaper on September 6, Jeffreys said the costs of identifying millions of genetic markers from all 500,000 volunteers would be excessive. Focused studies on specific diseases such as diabetes or cancer could be more cost effective, he said. "The project could soak up billions (of pounds), quite easily," Jeffreys was reported as saying. "My concern is whether a study constructed in that way will be effective at teasing out really quite subtle genetic factors influencing disease."Jeffreys' concerns were backed up by David Goldstein, professor of genetics at University College London, who told The Scientist he fears the £65.1 million Biobank initiative is too big to produce the best scientific results. "I am not persuaded that this is value for money," Goldstein said. "The amount of money earmarked for the Biobank would fund a tremendous amount of smaller, more focused studies."Goldstein said he fears there is a real danger that the project is too big to produce the most reliable information. "The question is whether it's worth the money. I feel it's a little bit trapped in the genetics mindset that says larger is better. But we don't always want larger, sometimes we want more thoughtful."But Biobank chief executive officer John Newton defended the initiative and said critics may not be aware that its true objectives go far beyond analyzing the genetic elements of disease. "We are interested in studying the determinants of health as much as disease," Newton told The Scientist. "So, for example, we may want to look at the distribution and causal factors of hypertension across the population–not just in diseased people."Newton told last week's annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held in Exeter, that the bank was the envy of rival US researchers and had a majority of UK scientists on its side."Scientists are overwhelmingly in favor of it," a Biobank spokesman told The Scientist. "For every one critic, we've probably got 12 people who say this is a fantastic opportunity for research."Leading geneticist Walter Bodmer, former head of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, said Jeffreys had misunderstood the aims of Biobank. "The idea is to take a representative sample of the population and follow their health to see what might be the underlying genetic factors," he told The Scientist. "It is completely complementary to the disease-specific studies that everybody already does." "I am a strong supporter of what's being planned and I have never been involved in a project that involved so much extensive consultation," said Bodmer.Alastair Kent, director of the Genetic Interest Group, an umbrella organization for 130 charities representing children, families, and individuals affected by genetic diseases, said he wholeheartedly supported the project. "You can never be sure that any piece of research will produce what it's intended to, but the indications are that Biobank is likely to boost scientific knowledge on a whole range of complex diseases."Richard Dawkins, Oxford professor for public understanding of science, has also backed the project. So too has John Sulston, Nobel Prize winner and former director of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.The Biobank initiative was hailed as one of the most ambitious scientific research projects ever undertaken when the idea was first unveiled 2 years ago. It will target people aged between 45 and 69 and will gather blood samples, lifestyle details, and medical histories.The plan is that a national database of unprecedented size will then be available for biomedical researchers studying diseases such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer's. A coordinating center is based in Manchester, in Northwest England, with six regional collaborating centers feeding into it.The chairman of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, Ian Gibson, said politicians would be keeping an eye on whether the funding, which comes from the Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, and the Department of Health, is being well spent. "We will be looking at it again to see what they're up to," he told The Scientist.Last year the committee produced a damning report that alleged the Biobank was nothing more than a 'politically driven project.'Correction (posted September 17): When originally posted, this story said that Richard Dawkins was a Nobel Prize winner. The Scientist regrets the error.

Biobank counters critics

Rebuttal for scientists who question cost-effectiveness of huge UK gene project

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