The Million Veteran Program: Consent, Anonymity and Return of Results

The Million Veteran Program will create a genomic database over 5-7 years of 1 million veterans who are users of the VA healthcare system. It will include DNA specimens and links to tissue specimens as well as access to the VA’s Electronic Medical Record system. If it is completed, it will be the largest DNA database with links to full health records in the world. The VA argues that the research done with the MVP database will have long-term health benefits to veterans. But it has also explicitly denied access to any medically relevant results to individual participants in the study. Is this fair? What do we owe veterans who donate to research and to genetic research participants more generally?

Suggested Readings:

• Henry T. Greely. The Uneasy Ethical and Legal Underpinnings of Large-Scale Genomic Biobanks. Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics 8, 343-64. Available to members of the Duke community here.
• David Kaufman, Juli Murphy, Lori Erby, Kathy Hudson and Joan Scott. Veterans’ attitudes regarding a database for genomic research. Genetics in Medicine 11:5, 329-37. Available to members of the Duke community here.
• The Veterans Affairs (VA) Office of Research and Development, Million Veterans Program, Information for Veterans. Available to members of the Duke community here.