Bermuda Principles: 30th Anniversary
- 1 min30 years ago this week, scientists in Bermuda agreed to share all Human Genome Project data within 24 hours.
That one-page agreement (bermudaprinciples.org) unlocked an estimated $965 billion in economic activity (Battelle, 2013). GenBank grew 53,000-fold. When COVID hit, GISAID, built on the Bermuda Principles model, enabled real-time global surveillance.
Meanwhile, both the UK and the US are stuck in the same architectural trap. The UK has spent two decades and billions of pounds on centralised health data programmes that follow the same pattern: centralise, resist, retreat, rebrand. The US has invested tens of billions in biomedical data platforms that cannot interoperate with one another. I should know: as CDO at Sage Bionetworks, and previously as CTO at Health Data Research UK (HDR UK), I helped build some of them. Excellent platforms, no shared grid.
The UK’s 600 million pound Health Data Research Service is a generational opportunity. The US has $47 billion annually from NIH and the first NIH-wide data-sharing mandate. Both need the same thing: protocols, not more platforms.
The evolution from genomics to health data is one sentence: from “release all data openly” to “make governance interoperable so data can be accessed safely.”
I have written two companion blog posts arguing the case for protocol-first infrastructure on both sides of the Atlantic:
More companion papers to follow on opentre.org
Happy 30th, Bermuda Principles. Now let’s write the health data chapter.
Susheel Varma
Chief Data Officer at Sage Bionetworks