Who will decide what populations are sampled?
Ultimately, each population will decide whether it wants to take part in the Project. (Defining the authority that speaks for “the population” whose approval must be received will be complicated in some circumstances, but for Native North Americans, for example, that will usually be an officially recognized tribal government.) To a large extent, the choices will be affected by which populations have anthropologists or other experts working among them. The Project expects that, in most circumstances, individual investigators will apply for grants to collect samples. Those grant applications will have to show that the population is willing to be sampled and that the investigator is an expert on that population, or is affiliated with someone who is, and that the data will be obtained in a manner consistent with the ethical guidelines of the HGD Project. The application should also indicate what, if anything, is of particular interest in studying that population. Some of the things that mi
