What stirred the most controversy was Stefansson's proposal in 1997 to create a database of copies of medical records data from the national health service to correlate with genealogical and genomic data. Supported by a large majority of the public and members of parliament, the Act on Health Sector Database authorizing the creation of such a database and its licensing for commercial use was passed in 1998. But it was fiercely opposed by a group of local academics and doctors as well as many international bioethicists. Opponents of the Iceland Health Sector Database (IHD) objected to the use of public data by a private enterprise and to presumed consent as the model for the use of medical records in research. They argued that the project put individuals' data privacy at risk, would stifle scientific freedom, and they generally disapproved of the new venture-funded model of biomedical innovation that deCODE represented.