as much data as possible: DNA contributed by tens of thousands of people; both broad and deep medical and health data; and, crucially, comprehensive genealogies linking all these participants together. In short, this required a population, with people willing to take part in research, a modern healthcare system with meaningful numbers of cases of most common diseases, and much genealogical data. Iceland, Stefansson's native country, with 270,000 people at the time, fit this description better than any other. In 1996, funded by $12 million in American venture capital, deCODE set up a laboratory and began operations. Within its first few years it recruited and genotyped tens of thousands of participants. It made rapid progress in creating a national genealogy database; developed a novel privacy protection system with government-supervised identity encryption; signed a landmark partnership with Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche; and mapped putative disease genes in a handful of conditions. At the same time as it was beginning to prove its science, the company ignited a huge controversy with the proposal to create a research database - the Iceland Health Sector Database (or IHD for short) - containing copies of medical records from across the country's national health service. In December 1998, with lobbying from deCODE, the Icelandic Parliament passed the Act on Health Sector Database which permitted public bidding for the right of a company to create this health database and use it for commercial research and to support the national health system. The parliament shortly thereafter granted deCODE the right to create this database after the company made a successful bid to do so. Widely supported by the public and parliament, the IHD's openly commercial aims, and proposed inclusion of medical records data unless individuals opted out, unleashed vehement opposition played out in the local and international media, led by a group of Icelandic activists as well as a number of foreign bioethicists. Although the IHD was never built, the debate underscored the political challenges involved in enlisting an entire society in a scientific enterprise, especially one with the explicit aim of commercializing its discoveries. It also ensured that deCODE and its approach went from being a peripheral curiosity to one of the highest profile enterprises in the global effort to understand the human genome. Genome of a Nation By the time Bill Clinton and Tony Blair announced the completion of the first rough draft of the human genome