ABSTRACT
The central idea of the Icelandic Biogenetic project is the assembly of medical records for the Icelandic population. The Health Sector Database represents the core of a larger project, the Icelandic Biogenetic Project that allows for the combination, under specific conditions and for specific purposes, of medical records, genetic information, and family histories. Whatever the genetic and historical facts of the Icelandic gene pool, the Biogenetic Project has been the center of a controversy. Thus, the Biogenetic Project and the imagery and rhetoric associated with it may reinforce a rather narrow notion of “Icelandicness,” a notion underlined in the nationalist discourse of the last century. The Icelandic opposition thus reveals concerns about potentially dramatic changes in the practices and structures of Icelandic bioscience and medicine. The idea that a person’s character, capabilities and dispositions are partly determined by what one would now translate as “inheritance” appears early on in some of the Icelandic sagas.
