Kári Stefánsson remembers exactly where he was when he formulated the idea for his company, deCODE Genetics. It was 1995, and he had recently moved from the University of Chicago to Harvard University. “I was sitting in Starbucks at the Beth Israel Hospital, and I put together this narrative for identifying genetic variants of a large number of diseases using data from a large number of people and also figuring out the structure of a population,” he says. “I proposed to do this in Iceland because the Icelandic population has the advantage of having started from a small number of colonizing individuals,” leading to what’s called a “founder effect.” He reasoned that because of this founder effect, the number of disease-associated genetic variants would be relatively small for each individual disease, so they’d be easier to identify among people in Iceland.
Stefánsson was a seasoned molecular biology and protein biochemistry ...
