London: A radical medical project that aims to recruit 100,000 Britons who are willing to share their genetic and health information with researchers and the wider public launches on Thursday.

The Personal Genome Project UK (PGP-UK) is the first in the country to work on the basis of “open consent”, which means that all medical information attached to a person’s record will be made available for anyone to see online.

The project is controversial because while people’s names and addresses will not appear on their records as standard, potential participants are warned explicitly that they could easily be identified and that their privacy cannot be guaranteed.

Before being allowed to join the project, people must score 100 percentage on a multiple choice test that is designed to check that they fully appreciate the risks of their genetic information going online.

They might carry genes that predispose them to an incurable disease, for example, and those genes could be shared with siblings or passed on to children. Participants must be 18 or over.

People who pass the test must then fill in a detailed health history questionnaire and complete a 19-page consent form.

“We are trying to make it very clear what the risks are,” said Jane Kaye, director of the Centre for Law, Health and Emerging Technologies at Oxford University. “This is not for everyone. We are talking about information altruists here.”

Britain is the fourth country to join the international personal genome project, which launched in the US in 2005 and has since been introduced in Canada and Korea.

The US project has thousands of people waiting to join, and has made around 700 genetic records public so far. Stephan Beck, director of PGP-UK, said he hoped to sequence the genomes of 50 people in the first year of the project.

People who join the project will be sent a kit to take cheek swabs for genetic analysis, and will be asked to attend a clinic to have blood or skin samples taken. Their genetic information is sent back to them, and is posted online a month later unless they withdraw from the project.

By making all of the medical information public, researchers hope to accelerate scientific understanding of how genes work with the environment to produce specific behaviours, diseases and other human traits. The project will help to spot causal links from genes to diseases such as cancer, diabetes and dementia.

Ross Anderson, a computer security expert at Cambridge University, urged people to think hard before signing up to the project. He emphasised that no one knew what scientific advances would be able to infer from genetic information in the next decade.

“To put 100,000 genomes on the web so anyone can download them and use them is more than creepy. I wouldn’t dream of doing it. You don’t know where that’s going to get to, we don’t know enough about this yet,” he said.

Helen Wallace, of GeneWatch, was also cautious. “GeneWatch UK’s view is that people should think twice before agreeing to share their genome openly. Remember your DNA contains a unique genetic code which can be used to track you and identify your relatives. Stored online it will be accessible to police, security and border agencies based in any country,” she said.

“This project is sponsored by companies who are lobbying to expand the market for whole genome sequencing and open this data up to commercial exploitation. Genes are poor predictors of most diseases in most people but companies from Google to the private healthcare industry want to data-mine this information for personalised marketing, massively expanding the market for drugs sold to healthy people.

“On the plus side, the PGP is being honest that your identity cannot be kept secret once they have your DNA, and asking adults only to give fully informed consent,” Wallace added.

“This contrasts with the government’s plans to share all NHS England medical records with private companies without consent, from which people will get a one-off chance to opt out early next year. DNA and genetic data is expected to be included in this system in the future, including from babies, and people are not going to be told who will get their genetic information and how they are going to use it.”