Little England

Council, the Wellcome Trust, the Department of Health, the Scottish Executive and the North West Regional Development Agency. A final protocol has been closely assessed by an independent international review panel set up by the funders. In its report the panel concluded that “UK Biobank has the potential, in ways that are not currently available elsewhere, to support a wide range of research”. It also praised the planning of the project, and the way it had dealt with potential ethical problems. The key role of participant consent has been highlighted by concerns raised last month that patient records in the UK’s National Health Service are planned to be loaded onto a national database. A survey amongst doctors and other health professionals found many uneasy about the storage of data without patients’ consent. The development of the Biobank is therefore likely to highlight the issue of consent, flagged up in the international review, as a key basis of its operation. Rory Collins, UK Biobank’s principal investigator, was delighted that the project had been given the thumbs up this summer. He said: “For decades to come, the UK Biobank resource should provide researchers around the world with vital insights into some of the most distressing diseases of middle and old age”. Colin Blakemore, MRC chief executive, said that the Biobank “offers enormous potential to find out more about the complex links between our genes, the lives we lead and our health.” Health minister Andy Burnham said the endorsement of Biobank showed the UK was at the forefront of applying new genetics-based knowledge for the benefit of patients. But there remain some worries. Helen Wallace, of the group GeneWatch, said there was concern that research funding might be better used elsewhere. She said: “We would still like to see a much more open process of decision-making which actively involves members of the public.” While many British appear happy for researchers to look at their genetic profile in terms of health, a recent television programme (100% English, Channel Four) debunked any notion that a person’s sense of Englishness has a genetic basis. The programme took a handful of proudly English individuals each convinced of their purely AngloSaxon heritage, then confronted them with DNA evidence taken from mouth swabs to the contrary. It then recorded their responses to the results. Carol Thatcher, daughter of the former prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, learned that her DNA results suggested that she was 24 per cent Middle Eastern in origin. She looked disconcerted. “Do you mean Mediterranean?” she asked, hopefully. No, said the presenter, historian Andrew Graham-Dixon. Mediawatch: Genes are shown to provide no support for peoples’ belief in the cause of their ‘Englishness’. Nigel Williams reports. Little England He meant Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Libya, places like that. Most of the participants tied themselves in knots over the question of Englishness, as their idea of what was proper struggled to hold sway over deeper feelings and a wish that their beliefs had a strong founding in their genetic ancestry. The comedian Danny Blue, who revelled in his Englishness, asserted that the research would reveal no dilution in his AngloSaxon inheritance over the past dozen or so generations and was adamant that anybody claiming to be English should have a similar genetic history. Danny’s DNA turned out to reveal its origins as 10 per cent Middle Eastern, 11 per cent south Asian, 37 per cent southeastern European and 43 per cent northern European. “Bit of a mongrel, aren’t I”, he said reluctantly. He resolved that if you could trace back your ancestry two or three generations in this country, you could call yourself English. With growing globalisation, the programme was a timely reminder of the differences between culture and ancestry.