Icelanders as Subjects of Science

Abstract

In this chapter I discuss plans that were made in Iceland to establish a database with health, genetic and genealogical data for the entire nation. I first describe these plans in some detail and then discuss their relation to the discredited eugenics discourse and how that discourse together with the promises of a genetics revolution was deployed to produce a docile research population. In this case the Foucauldian biopolitics of the population is concentrated on a population of a single nation as a research population, for the benefit of science and the economy.