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Science 14 August 2009:
Vol. 325. no. 5942, pp. 818 - 819
DOI: 10.1126/science.1173284
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Policy Forum

Research Ethics:

Children and Population Biobanks

David Gurwitz,1,* Isabel Fortier,2 Jeantine E. Lunshof,3,4 Bartha Maria Knoppers5

Population biobanks, which store and distribute human DNA, cell lines, and tissue samples collected from large cohorts, are being established and are growing in size (1). These population biobanks are often funded wholly or in part by governments and are envisaged as novel resources for national and international biomedical research programs. Such programs include studies on associations between genotypes, environmental exposure measures, socioeconomic parameters, and phenotypes of human health and disease.

1 National Laboratory for the Genetics of Israeli Populations, Department of Human Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, 69978, Israel.
2 Public Population Project in Genomics (P3G), 3333 Queen Mary Road, Suite 590, Montreal, Quebec, H3V 1A2, Canada.
3 European Centre for Public Health Genomics; Faculty of Health, Medicine, and Life Sciences; Maastricht University, 6200 MD Maastricht, Netherlands.
4 Department of Molecular Cell Physiology, VU University Amsterdam, 1081 HV Amsterdam, Netherlands.
5 Centre of Genomics and Policy, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Human Genetics, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, H3A 1A4, Canada.

* Author for correspondence. E-mail: gurwitz{at}post.tau.ac.il

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)