rate of new sample collection was 20 million per year. These numbers represent a fundamental worldwide change in the nature of research between the time when such numbers of samples could not be used and the time when researchers began demanding them. Collectively, researchers began to progress beyond single-center research centers to a next-generation qualitatively different research infrastructure. Some of the challenges raised by the advent of biobanks are ethical, legal, and social issues pertaining to their existence, including the fairness of collecting donations from vulnerable populations, providing informed consent to donors, the logistics of data disclosure to participants, the right to ownership of intellectual property, and the privacy and security of donors who participate. Because of these new problems, researchers and policymakers began to require new systems of research governance. Many researchers have identified biobanking as a key area for infrastructure development in order to promote drug discovery and drug development. Types and applications Human genetics research By the late 1990s, scientists realized that although many diseases are caused at least in part by a genetic component, few diseases originate from a single defective gene; most genetic diseases are caused by multiple genetic factors on multiple genes. Because the strategy of looking only at single genes was ineffective for finding the genetic components of many diseases, and because new technology made the cost of examining a single gene versus doing a genome-wide scan about the same, scientists began collecting much larger amounts of genetic information when any was to be collected at all. At the same time technological advances also made it possible for wide sharing of information, so when data was collected, many scientists doing genetics work found that access to data from genome-wide scans collected for any one reason would actually be useful in many other types of genetic research. Whereas before data usually stayed in one laboratory, now scientists began to store large amounts of genetic data in single places for community use and sharing. An immediate result of doing genome-wide scans and sharing data was the discovery of many single-nucleotide polymorphisms, with an early success being an improvement from the identification of about 10,000 of these with single-gene scanning and before biobanks versus 500,000 by 2007 after the genome-wide scanning practice had been in place for some years. A problem remained; this changing practice allowed the collection of genotype data, but it did not simultaneously