Heirs of the Vikings cash in on their heritage

ANCIENT they may be, but the Icelandic sagas could provide new insights into the genetic causes of many common diseases. A company called deCode Genetics, based in Reykjavik, has been set up to take advantage of Iceland's unique combination of fastidious record keeping—which has its origins in the medieval sagas—and the population's extremely low genetic variability. These two factors make Iceland an ideal place to search for disease genes.

The 270 000 Icelanders alive today are almost all descended from a small group of Norwegian pioneers who colonised the island in the 9th century. To identify genes connected with particular diseases, geneticists study families with a history of the condition. They compare DNA sequences of affected family members with those from healthy relatives, looking for unusual sequences in affected people that might turn out to be the defective genes. Identifying the disease genes is much easier if the population as ...