Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
pay are still issues - but Icelandic women are well educated and independent, with the
same opportunities as Icelandic men.
Iceland only had one TV channel until 1988 - which went off air on Thursdays so that cit-
izens could do something more productive instead. It's said that most children born before
1988 were conceived on a Thursday…
Iceland has one of the world's highest life expectancies - 81 years for men and 84 years
for women.
Icelandic Ancestry & Genetic Research
Biotech research is big in Iceland - thanks, in part, to the 12th-century historian Ari the
Learned. Ari's
Landnámabók
and
Íslendingabók
mean that Icelanders can trace their fam-
ily trees right back to the 9th century.
In 1996, neuroscience expert Dr Kári Stefánsson recognised that this genealogical ma-
terial could be combined with Iceland's unusually homogenous population to produce
something unique - a country-sized genetic laboratory. In 1998 the Icelandic government
controversially voted to allow the creation of a single database, by presumed consent, con-
taining all Icelanders' genealogical, genetic and medical records. Even more controver-
sially, the government allowed Kári's biotech startup company deCODE Genetics to create
this database, and access it for its biomedical research, using the database to trace inherit-
able diseases and pinpoint the genes that cause them.
The decision sparked public outrage in Iceland and arguments across the globe about its
implications for human rights and medical ethics. Should a government be able to sell off
its citizens' medical records? And is it acceptable for a private corporation to use such re-
cords for profit?
While the arguments raged (and investors flocked), the company set to work. The data-
base was declared unconstitutional in 2003, deCODE was declared bankrupt in 2010, and
sold to US biotech giant Amgen in 2012. By that time, deCODE had built a research data-
base using DNA and clinical data from more than 100,000 volunteers (one-third of the
population), and had done work in isolating gene mutations linked to heart attacks, strokes
and Alzheimer's disease.
