Big longitudinal social study halted by lack of recruits

Life Study, which was intending to follow babies through their lives, is abandoned after failure to recruit enough mothers

An ambitious study to collect data about British babies and follow them through their lives has been abandoned less than a year after it was launched.

It was hoped more than 16,000 prospective mothers would be recruited for the project, called Life Study. But by September, only 249 women had agreed to take part. As a result, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), which oversaw the study, announced last week it would close. The project, which was also backed by the Medical Research Council, had already consumed more than 9m. "We had hoped to use Life Study to find out why some people - including those from ethnic minorities - are more susceptible to environmental factors than others," Jane Elliott, the ESRC's chief executive, told the Observer. "However, we could not recruit the numbers of prospective mothers we needed and so we had no alternative but to call a halt to the project."