For instance, in October, biologists at King’s College, London, crowed that they’d pulled off “the largest genetic study of anxiety to date.” They had compared the DNA of UK Biobank volunteers with their answers to survey questions about things like how worried and afraid they felt. They found four new “hits” on two chromosomes.

Such hits are recorded as a sharp spikes on diagrams scientists call Manhattan plots. Until recently, some of these genetic skylines weren’t any too detailed. For schizophrenia, for instance, hits have been hard to come by, and the disease remains mostly unexplained. But with more people’s DNA to study, the plots are starting to bristle. Anyone can look up the results using newly created online services, like the Global Biobank Engine put up by Stanford University.

New drugs

At GSK, the British drug company, the U.K. data is being used for “reverse” searches. That is, instead of trying to find every gene involved in one disease, Nelson, the company’s genetic chief, says his team wants to trace every health effect of blocking or boosting a single gene, as they might do with a drug.

And it turns out that medical records of people with natural mutations in a given gene provide clues. Did they have diabetes less often? More heart attacks? It’s like seeing what a drug does before anyone even swallows it. “That’s going to be the main use case of the biobank for drug companies,” says Nelson.

Despite selling $30 billion worth of pills a year, GSK “never had the resources” to build a private data bank of its own, says Nelson. But since the summer, GSK says, it is suddenly on par with competitors that did. After DeCode, the Icelandic company, reported an important discovery connected to asthma in March, Nelson says his team was later able to repeat the result “in a matter of hours.”

Health predictions

Public gene data is expected to proliferate even further. In China, the Kadoorie Biobank has been recruiting half a million adults from 10 regions of the country, asking them about tea drinking, exposure to pollution, sleep, and alcohol. In the U.S., there’s the Million Veteran Program run by the Department of Veterans Affairs as well as the Obama-era precision medicine initiative, now called AllofUs.

Some startup entrepreneurs say the DNA findings are also going to increase the number, and quality, of direct-to-consumer DNA tests. Such tests, which often try to use DNA to tell people about their diet or fitness, have been criticized by some doctors as medically dubious guesswork.

Yet with half a million new subjects to study, DNA predictions about people’s health risks will get more accurate. “We are furiously trying to get access to that data as quickly as we can,” says Chris Glode, CEO of HumanCode, a company developing DNA “entertainment” tests, including one called BabyGlimpse that tells two people, on the basis of their DNA, what their kids would look like. “The reason it’s so hot right now is it’s the first broadly available data for training models. It’s something we can throw computers, hypotheses, against to see what we can come up with.”

Sudlow, the Biobank science chief, says she doesn’t think the project’s data will be able to tell doctors who will get sick, with what, and when. “The majority of diseases are not predictable from DNA alone. I think we are a very long way from that,” she says. “I think the role is to discover disease mechanisms, rather than working out which individuals will develop which disease.”

The July data release isn’t the culmination of the project. In fact, the data collecting will end only when the last volunteer has succumbed to dementia, cancer, or another cause of death. “I think our kids are going to answer the most interesting questions,” she says.