L

Lord Tarassenko (CB)

Speaking in the House of Lords on 28 April 2026

Debate

UK Biobank Data

Contribution

May I ask the Minister a follow-up question to the one I asked previously? He is absolutely right that UK Biobank should get in touch with the institutions where the principal investigators are based, but a lot of inadvertent leakage, if you will, of the data occurs from the researchers themselves—the principal investigators—who, believe it or not, will put the data on GitHub. They may leave the institution and go and work somewhere else while the data remains on their GitHub. That is why I asked whether the UK Biobank board could be a little more proactive and ask researchers from the Oxford Internet Institute, for example, who are very capable at looking at those types of issues, to look at individual GitHub sites and other sites where the data may still be, even though the institutions which those principal investigators were at would not be aware of it.

More from Lord Tarassenko (CB)

Other recent Hansard contributions by the same speaker.

About Hansard

Hansard is the official verbatim record of proceedings in the UK Parliament. Every word spoken in the Commons and Lords is recorded and published — this page is a single contribution from that record.

Partner sites