be in the regions of genes that encode proteins, providing both a direct window on disease biology and so more direct utility as drug targets. In December 2012, the American pharmaceutical company Amgen acquired deCODE for $415 million. A key rationale for the acquisition was deCODE's unique ability to use WGS data to discover rare coding variants and cause extreme versions of more common diseases. As Sean Harper, then Amgen's head of R&D told Forbes, "It was really working on targets like PCSK9 [for heart disease]...that really drove home the immense value of having targets that have either been discovered or validated by the kind of human genetic analysis that Decode is a world expert in." More broadly, these capabilities could be applied to evaluate current programs as well, and within month of the acquisition deCODE had reviewed Amgen's entire pipeline. In 2018, Harper estimated that "just [by] having strong genetic support for half your pipeline you can improve your rate of return on R&D investments by approximately 50%." By 2020, Amgen had brought two new cardiovascular drugs into clinical trials based directly on deCODE discoveries, which continue to be published in leading scientific journals. As global model Introducing Stefansson for the organizations at the American Society of Human Genetics annual meeting in 2017, the Broad Institute's Mark Daly observed that the meeting and the field were dominated by "a pervasive paradigm involving biobanks recruited with full population engagement, historical medical registry data, investments in large-scale genetic data collection and statistical methodology, and collaborative follow-up across academic and industry boundaries...[and] deCODE provided the template for this discovery engine." From its early days, deCODE's example gave fresh impetus to others hunting for disease genes in isolated communities and small populations in Sardinia, Quebec, Newfoundland, northern Sweden, Finland, and elsewhere. However deCODE was not touting the Icelandic population's "relative homogeneity" in order to find variants causing rare syndromes, but because the existence of founder mutations would help to power discovery of variants impacting common disease. In terms of its relevance to global medical challenges, Iceland was not an inbred population with a high prevalence of rare syndromes but rather a European society in miniature that could be studied as a whole: not the biggest small population so much as the smallest big one. The first large country to follow deCODE's example was the UK. Iceland's experience, behind the scientific and medical value