President Obama is looking to create a massive biobank that would include the medical records and genetic information of one million Americans. The White House is set to announce plans for the biobank, which would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, according to scientists familiar with the proposal. The biobank would use existing medical records, rather than solicit data from volunteers, and it would have the potential to discover new disease-gene associations. The U.K., Iceland, and Japan have already established similar biobanks.
