The world’s largest health-research study is under way in Britain

Volunteer number oneNHSNHS rolled up his sleeve on July 12th last year. Volunteer two put out an arm to give blood the same day. Volunteer 100 stepped onto the scales on August 3rd. A tape measure was slipped around the waist of volunteer 1,000 on September 30th. Then things sped up: volunteer 100,000 gave blood this March. The roll is now growing so fast—by thousands every day—that putting a precise number in print is pointless: by the time you read this it will be out of date. By the end of this year this research study—called Our Future Health—will be Britain’s largest of its kind. By the end of next year, the world’s.Across Britain, the study is unfurling. In Liverpool and in London, in Manchester and Grimsby and Oxford, in dreary supermarket car parks, mobile vans are drawing up, cubicle curtains being drawn back and queues forming. The plan is to recruit 5m people—almost as many as there are in —and get them , measured, quizzed, genotyped, phenotyped. Then to put the data to work to see who gets sick, with what, and when, and why—and if intervening early can help. The aim is simple. To save them—and the . Because as Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at Oxford University and the study’s chair, says, the is “not sustainable in its current form”.