Danish doctors are fighting tooth-and-nail to halt the government-sanctioned sale of personal health data. Meanwhile, the desperate citizens of Kannapolis are willingly selling their health data to David Murdock.

Today’s Kannapolis does not offer as many good blue-collar jobs as it used to—unemployment still hovers at 10 percent—but it does provide plenty of opportunities for locals to serve as human research subjects. At any given time, Kannapolites can take part in studies of nutrition, longevity, or cognitive or physical performance; eat a standardized diet; or spend time in a metabolic chamber while their vital signs are monitored—sometimes for $30 to $250 and up.

Some difficult questions need to be answered before one can commit to a whole-sale biobank study of this scale.

Indeed, it’s not clear how well Kannapolites even understand what they’re agreeing to when they elect to participate in the MURDOCK Study. Not because they’re unsophisticated, especially, but because biobanking itself, in the eyes of some bioethicists, entails notable departures from the established tenets of research on human subjects.