Yostivanich

Ok, so I know this is kinda old news but I just hadn’t got­ten around to blog­ging about it and I kept putting it off. Tonight we get dis­cuss, ladies and gen­tle­men, the largest sci­en­tific study every under­taken or even thought up of. This is the study to end all stud­ies, at least that is the hope of the British researchers. The goal of this study is to take half a mil­lion British cit­i­zens, have them fill out health ques­tion­naires and to donate their DNA. The cit­i­zens will then go on about their daily rou­tine, and when­ever they get sick, they will record it for the sci­en­tists. The goal here is to see if there is any link between the person’s DNA and the envi­ron­ment that they live in to account for them get­ting sick over some­one else. Now when I say sick, we are not dis­cussing just a sim­ple cold or flu, rather can­cers, heart dis­ease, dia­betes and Alzheimer’s.

The prob­lems that I see with this fall into three issues: Num­ber One – how do com­pile the data and DNA for 500,000 peo­ple effec­tively, Num­ber Two – pri­vacy and Secu­rity for these peo­ple health infor­ma­tion and DNA, Num­ber Three – what is the point of this study. Let’s take these one at a time and explain what exactly is the prob­lem and why I feel this is a problem.

First issue is the han­dling of data and DNA for that many peo­ple and vari­ables in an exper­i­ment to last for so long and also to be as real­is­tic as pos­si­ble. These are peo­ple who will be liv­ing their own sep­a­rate lives in approx­i­mately half a mil­lion dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ties, being exposed and sub­ject­ing them­selves to a huge vari­ety of influ­ences. Heart Dis­eases as many stud­ies have show is trig­gered by a great vari­ety of things, how do you plan to iso­late whether it was genet­ics or envi­ron­ment that caused some­one to suf­fer a cer­tain prob­lem. The other prob­lem is the sheer mechan­ics of ana­lyz­ing all the data that each per­son will develop for the orga­ni­za­tion. In short I feel that this study will not be com­pleted in any real time­frame sim­ply by sheer weight of num­bers. The study is to big to be han­dled effectively.

That being said, the next issue is when we get to the pri­vacy of the users and their med­ical infor­ma­tion and DNA. Obvi­ously this data is not going to be just put some­where that any per­son would be able to inter­act with the data and steal it. How­ever with the sheer size of the study, you would need dozens if not hun­dreds of peo­ple inter­act­ing with the infor­ma­tion, to hope­fully extract some­thing use­ful. This is a very really prob­lem, any one with com­mon sense will tell you that as you add more users onto a sys­tem that have access to sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion, the more likely a mis­take or error could occur and some­thing bad hap­pen. The more peo­ple you have to police and be sure no one does any­thing inap­pro­pri­ate with the data, the higher the likely hood some­one will do some­thing stu­pid. We have all done it at one point or another, said or done some­thing that we knew very well was wrong and should not have done and it was stu­pid of us. Ok, take the likely hood of one per­son doing some­thing stu­pid and mul­ti­ply it by the num­ber of peo­ple with access to the information.

Now comes the final and some­times the one that most non-scientists com­plain about the most. What is the point of this study? (Note – I always accept crit­i­cism of my argu­ments, just write a com­ment if you feel I am wrong.) This study seems largely a waste, we already know that genet­ics does effect your chances of being affected by dis­eases and we know that envi­ron­ment plays another large part in this. It seems to me, that there is sim­ply too many vari­ables and not enough con­stants to make this study use­ful beyond learn­ing the health char­ac­ter­is­tics of a por­tion of the British pop­u­la­tion. Which if the researches wanted that, they could ana­lyze death cer­tifi­cates to find the causes of death. Over­all I find this study too large to be han­dled prop­erly both in terms of ana­lyz­ing the data and also in pro­tect­ing the per­sonal infor­ma­tion of the par­tic­i­pants of this study.

P.S. Sorry about not post­ing last night, it was a busy night for me with classes and such. I will try to do some­thing so I can be sure that I have some­thing to post every night, but every once in awhile I might either get to it late or have a really short post or not even post any­thing. I’m in col­lege and work­ing a job, this is what I do for fun but I still have to study and work and such.