iPsych has extracted DNA from thousands of banked blood samples originally taken during the heel prick test, which is used to screen newborns for serious health conditions…. The team wanted to ensure that its study represented the Danish population. But asking people to give consent inevitably skews a data set toward those who are wealthier, older, and more educated, Mortensen says. This could produce spurious results, which would have an “ethical cost,” he says, so the iPsych team asked to waive this requirement. Danish law allowed a waiver, he says, providing a study doesn’t endanger or inconvenience participants and would be impaired if consent were required. In January 2012, a regional science ethics committee in Denmark agreed, giving iPsych permission to extract genetic data from the country’s newborn blood samples for the next decade without participants’ consent.