ICELAND’S grand plans for a national genetic database have hit the rocks, after the country’s supreme court ruled that the law used to create it is unconstitutional.
In November, the court upheld the right of Ragnhildur Gudmundsdóttir to withhold her deceased father’s medical records from the database. A detailed English translation of that ruling was made public on 1 April.
The court decided that the law, designed to set up a gene database of the entire Icelandic population to aid discovery of genes linked with disease, breached the plaintiff’s right to privacy. Gudmundsdóttir’s father had not given consent for…
