18 4 JANUARY 2019 • VOL 363 ISSUE 6422 sciencemag.org SCIENCE

I

n early 2017, epidemiologist Rory

Collins at the University of Oxford in

the United Kingdom and his team

faced a test of their principles. They

run the UK Biobank (UKB), a huge

research project probing the health

and genetics of 500,000 British peo-

ple. They were planning their most

sought-after data release yet: genetic

profiles for all half-million participants.

Three hundred research groups had signed

up to download 8 terabytes of data—the

equivalent of more than 5000 streamed

movies. That’s enough to tie up a home

computer for weeks, threatening a key goal

of the UKB: to give equal access to any

qualified researcher in the world.

“We wanted to create a level playing

field” so that someone at a big center with

a supercomputer was at no more of an ad-

vantage than a postdoc in Scotland with a

smaller computer and slower internet link,

says Oxford’s Naomi Allen, the project’s chief

epidemiologist. They came up with a plan:

They gave researchers 3 weeks to download

the encrypted files. Then, on 19 July 2017,

they released a final encryption key, firing

the starting gun for a scientific race.

Within a couple of days, one U.S. group

had done quick analyses linking more than

120,000 genetic markers to more than

2000 diseases and traits, data it eventu-

ally put up on a blog. Only 60,000 markers

had previously been tied to disease, says

human geneticist Eric Lander, president

and director of the Broad Institute in Cam-

bridge, Massachusetts. “[They] doubled

that in a week.”

Within 2 weeks, others had begun to

post draft manuscripts on the bioRxiv pre-

print site. By now, those data have spawned

dozens of papers in journals or on bioRxiv,

firming up how particular genes contrib-

ute to heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s,

and other conditions, as well as genes’ role

in shaping personality, depression, birth

weight, insomnia, and other traits. More

controversially, data from the trove also

pointed to DNA markers linked to educa-

tion level and sexual orientation, stoking

long-running controversies about the ap-

plication of genetics to behavior in people.

When the Manchester-based UKB en-

rolled its first volunteer 13 years ago, some

critics wondered whether it would be a

waste of time and money. But by now, any

skepticism is long gone. “It’s now clear

that it has been a massive success—largely

because the big data they have are being

made widely available,” says Oxford de-

velopmental neuropsychologist Dorothy

Bishop, a participant. Other biobanks are

bigger or collect equally detailed health

data. But the UKB has both large numbers

of participants and high-quality clinical

information. It “allows us to do research

on a scale that we’ve never been able to do

before,” says Peter Visscher, a quantitative

geneticist at the University of Queensland

in Brisbane, Australia.

The crucial ingredient, however, may be

open access. Researchers around the world

can freely delve into the UKB data and rap-

idly build on one another’s work, resulting

in unexpected dividends in diverse fields,

How an open-access trove of

data on Britons is unlocking

the genetics of disease,

behavior, and physical traits

BIOLOGY

IN THE BANK

FEATURES

PHOTO: NIGEL HILIER

By Jocelyn Kaiser and Ann Gibbons

Published by AAAS

on January 3, 2019^

http://science.sciencemag.org/

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