Have your say on government e-petitions

Free voluntary national DNA database for family, medical and crime investigation

Submitted on Tuesday 23rd June 2020

Rejected on Thursday 10th September 2020

Current status: Rejected

Rejection code: no-action (see below for details)

Petition Action

Free voluntary national DNA database for family, medical and crime investigation

Petition Details

This has to be ethical (so joining must be voluntary) and very large (so free or cheap and of interest to family historians). Sponsoring it meets not only the DNA database needs of the nation but also the moral and social imperative of every child's right to know their own biological parentage.

Additional Information

Testing enough volunteers for a large set of markers can help identify people of interest without these needing to be tested.

This UK asset will attract full-price customers among genealogists in the USA, Australia, Canada and NZ. It would save having UK enthusiasts use test labs in the USA.

Priority would be for the old, whose results give the most 'reach' and would otherwise be lost. Next are those without a father named on their birth certificate, who could gain emotionally and materially.


You can't sign this petition because it was rejected. But you can still comment on it here at Repetition.me!

This petition was rejected

The Government e-Petitions Team gave the following reason:

There is already a National DNA database, run by the Home Office, which stores DNA from suspects and crime scenes to help the police to fight crime. You could start a petition calling for people to be allowed to voluntarily donate their DNA to this database with the sole purpose of helping the police fight crime, if that is something you'd like to happen.

Similarly, the NHS runs a genomics project in which people can voluntarily take part. You could therefore start a petition calling for this scheme to be extended to allow the public to voluntarily donate their DNA for the purposes of informing treatment decisions and medical research, if that is something you'd like to happen.

The establishment of any commercial DNA database for genealogy purposes would not be the responsibility of the UK Government.

Have your say on this petition!

comments powered by Disqus

repetition.me is a Good Stuff website

18.119.235.107 Mon, 30 Dec 2024 17:45:43 +0000