. >> reporter: erica goodmanson is director of the national archives of iceland which has a treasure trove of family records going back centuries. >> without this, we wouldn't know who we are. >> reporter: decode worked to compile a massive online database of genealogy which it called the book of icelanders. some, like goodmanson, can trace their families back to the 19th century. from that database, decode can study how people with disease are related to one another, and then mine their injecgenetics f what could have caused the illness. the collection of data is massive. inside this subzero freezer, 15 degrees below zero to be exact, are stored half a million blood samples from half the population of iceland, 160,000 people. it represents the past, present, and future of research. it's a boon for pharmaceutical companies. ceo bob bradway says the icelandic company is helping accelerate its work. >> one of the things we know about science and the discovery of new medicine is it's hard. it's hard, it takes a long time, and it's expensive. one of the things that we find exciting about

erica goodmanson is director of the national archives of iceland, which has a treasure trove of recordsack centuries. >> a memory of the nation. without that we wouldn't know who we are. >> reporter: decode couples that with a huge amount of genetic information to make discoveries. inside this sub zero freezer, about 15 degrees below zero to be exact, are stored half a million blood samples from half the population of iceland, about 160,000 people. it represents the past, present and future of this research. other countries and companies are trying to emulate the work in iceland including the united states. the all of us project launched during the obama administration aims to gather genetic data from at least a million americans and combine it with health information from electronic medical records, information from surveys and wearable sensors. >> we are anxious to move as quickly as possible away from a one size fits all approach to how to keep people healthy or manage chronic illnesses or keep people healthy into individualized. >> and companies are using these genetic insights in d