Some 90,000 babies born in the UK will grow up to become some of the most scientifically scrutinised in the world. The UK government announced today that researchers will track the group in a new multi-million pound ‘birth cohort’ study with the aim of understanding how social, economic and biological factors during pregnancy and infancy eventually influence people’s health, development, occupation, education and well being.

The cohort will be the latest in a series of British cohort studies that have tracked children from birth. It comes in the week that members of the oldest of these cohorts, all born in one week in March 1946, celebrate their 65th birthday. The 1946 study has become the oldest continuous running birth cohort in the world and a feature in Nature this week tells how this group of ordinary British men and women have become some of the most scientifically valuable people in the planet. Later British cohort studies were started in 1958, 1970 and at the turn of the millennium, efforts that are a point of envy amongst epidemiologists because such studies are expensive and difficult to start and sustain.

Unlike previous cohorts, the newest one will reflect today’s intense research interest in the long term impacts of genetic and environmental influences during pregnancy and early infancy. A range of social and biomedical information will be gathered on parents during pregnancy; and from the parents and baby twice during the first year. Plans for the new cohort were stuck in funding limbo for several months after the UK general election last year. The announcement today by David Willetts, universities and science minister, confirmed that it will be funded as part of £33.5 million awarded from the Government Department of Business Innovation and Skills, the Economic and Social Research Council and the Medical Research Council — a sizable chunk of funding in the country’s current cost cutting climate. A large part of the funding will go to a new research facility which will co-ordinate studies from all the British birth cohorts.

The 1946 cohort members will have the opportunity to meet for the first time at a birthday party in their honour at the British Library on March 3rd. Amongst its numerous findings, the study has shown that the socioeconomic circumstances the children were born into has had long lasting effects on later educational attainment and disease risk. Many other birth cohort studies have started since: the National Children’s Study in the United States is now recruiting 100,000 children with the aim of tracking them from birth to age 21.