China recently launched its first biobank, a database with information on people's medical history, lifestyle, occupation and blood sample for DNA analysis in Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province.
  
The program, jointly funded by the Guangzhou No. 12 People's Hospital, the University of Hong Kong and the UK-based University of Birmingham, aims to create profiles for 50,000 Guangzhou people aged above 50 in four to five years, Wednesday's Beijing Youth Daily reported.
  
"By tracing their information for a few years, we hope to investigate and determine genetic factors that caused some fatal diseases, such as malignant tumors, coronary heart disease and diabetes," said Jiang Chaoqiang, hospital director and also one of the three leading project managers.
  
Information collection on the first 10,000 elderly people is scheduled to be finished by September, according to the hospital.
  
"We target elderly people as the incidence of diseases is high among this group. A five to ten year monitoring will probably provide some results," said Jiang.
  
"Another reason is that they don't change their job and residence as often as the young and therefore are easy to be traced."
  
All the blood samples in the project could be used by the Guangdong, Hong Kong and UK parties, but are solely owned by the hospital, which has invested heavily to prepare liquid nitrogen tanks to store the samples, according Jiang.
  
The hospital will carefully protect the privacy of the volunteers. In the computer, each person's information is assigned with a password which only very few senior scientists know. Every blood sample is tagged before it is stored so they won't be mixed.
  
Volunteers are required to fill out a 55-page-long questionnaire with detailed questions, such as "If you like hot food, how spicy do you have it?" with three choices, "A little, moderate or extreme".
  
Psychological questions like "Do you have friends to talk to when you are in trouble?" are also included. 

(Xinhua News Agency March 10, 2004)