Chasing pregnant women, congressional district × budgeting shenanigans, Big Science (with a capital B and a capital S) comes to child health and development as the National Children’s Study seeks to following children from birth to age 21. The ambition and scope is a bit staggering, but they intend to collect hundreds of phenotypic, genotypic, and environmental measurements for each participant and compare them against outcomes in pregnancy, development, behavior, and health with a particular focus on asthma, obesity, and injury.

I guess we have 21 years to look forward to the results of gene × environment interactions on temperament and emotional regulation, though from the wording in the research plan on exposures and outcomes (pdf) I cannot tell if they intend to collect personality data on the parents as well.

But the big problem the Times is reporting is with recruitment. Mothers and communities are wary of investing in the project when it isn’t clear how the data are to be used or what the benefit will be. This is a problem in smaller scale research, too, such as with the hapless psychology study participant who might get some cake, or £5, or even as little as 5¢ if they wander into the peat bog of Mechanical Turk. There is no reason to invest because there is no way to track your returns. And with an enterprise as massive as the National Children’s Study, carried over such an extensive period of time, we have to be comfortable with the possibility that the study will affect the very exposures it is designed to detect. Mother’s are right to ask: what’s in it for me and my baby?