Canadian Province Seeks Control of Its Genes

Extract

It started 6 years ago with “the Texas vampires.” That was the name that locals dubbed a team of researchers from Houston that had come to their small town in the far easterly Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador, “bled” them to collect DNA samples, and then vanished without a trace or ever relating the results of their study.

A year later, there was the group from Ontario involved in a little-known study of an inherited heart condition in another remote Newfoundland town. Their work prompted the front-page headline in a national Canadian newspaper, “ `Doomed' Newfoundlanders opt to eat, drink, and be merry,” suggesting that the townspeople now thought they were genetically determined to an early death.

“Everybody was wondering, what's going on here?” said Daryl Pullman, Ph.D., a bioethicist at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John's. “How many studies are taking place in the province that we aren't even aware of?”