ABSTRACT
Since the Icelandic Health Sector Database Project emerged in the late 1990s (Pálsson 2007), biobanks have been a heavily debated topic both in mass and academic media. Besides the 'usual' concerns discussed in light of the emergence of a new medical technology, such as informed consent, ownership, and genetic privacy (see, for example, Meslin and Quaid 2004; Hoeyer 2004; Austin et al. 2003), some biobanks seem to have raised an additional sort of question: What is a population? Which categories can be used in order to delineate it (Tutton, Chapter 10)? 2 The Human Genome Diversity Project, originally proposed in 1991 (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1991), which aimed to explore the genetic diversity of the human species, was practically put on hold by controversies over group consent and what constitutes 'groupness' (Reardon 2004; Juengst 1998). 3 The developers of the Icelandic Health Sector Database faced criticism with regard to their claim of the 'homogeneity' of the Icelandic population (see, for example, Árnason et al. 2000), Some authors have accused all 'population thinking' in the context of human population genetics as contributing to racism, or representing a new sort of racism (Gannett 2001; see also Collins and Mansoura 2001; Duster 2005). Others contend that the category of 'race' in genetic research, however defined cannot be avoided entirely (Kalow 2001; Risch et al. 2002), and call for a careful definition and use (Sankar and Cho 2002; Daar and Singer 2005) Particularly large-scale population-genetic biobank projects which aim to 'represent' the DNA of a given population in a biobank (such as the Estonian Genome Project; see Eensaar, Chapter 4), but also smaller initiatives focusing on one segment of a population only, sometimes uncover certain tacit conventions which, when exposed, resuscitate unresolved conflicts about legitimate and ethically 'correct' ways of relating to skin-colour, ethnicity, and religious identities (Prainsack and Hashiloni-Dolev 2008).
