A new School of Medicine Web site (http://gmed.bu.edu/) that could establish a precedent for open and collaborative genetics research may also help researchers find genetic links to many common ailments, such as high cholesterol and high blood pressure will be published soon in Nature Genetics.

According to lead author Alan Herbert, “It’s about a speeding discovery of genetic variations that affect human disease, because it’s such a long time under-taking, and studies are being done by many scientists. We are trying to accelerate the process by bringing all the results out there so that other people can see, so that if they use the same technology or have other data that can confirm or deny what we find, and they can collaborate to help to speed validation of candidate associations.”

This kind of open sharing is not the norm in cutting-edge genetics research because scientists often build their careers on published research and discoveries they can claim as their own. Indeed, this spring, the World Health Organization was accused of putting scientific prestige above the best interest of world public health by keeping the newly discovered genetic sequence of the mutating bird flu virus in a password-protected database, open only to researchers who had contributed data.

Dr. Herbert added, “One of our goals is to establish the precedent that this information should be made publicly available and not locked away,” Herbert says. “The understanding about what makes us human and affects our risk of disease should not be owned by anyone.”