Super Bowl Footballs Get The DNA Touch

theodp writes "All 120 Super Bowl XL footballs will be marked with a drop of synthetic DNA to thwart potential counterfeiters (free reg. required to read) who might be tempted to sell phony game-used Super Bowl footballs, which can be worth thousands of dollars. Exposed to a specific laser frequency, the DNA glows to a bright green. 'The chance of replicating this exact DNA sequence is one in 33 trillion,' said the president of PSA/DNA Authentication Services."

Comments

Perhaps

[CountBrass]

33 trillion to 1? Yeah right. All a counterfeiter needs do is make it glow roughly the same green. No need to actually replicate the DNA sequence: no-one will actually check that anyway!

Re:Perhaps

[RomulusNR]

And who's going to have one of those very specifically-tuned lasers to check them with?

Business plan

[pgfuller]

1) Purchase legitimate game ball for 'thousands' 2) Extract DNA sequence and replicate using PCR or actually sequence it and then create more 3) ... 4) Profit !

Re:Billions, so what?

[TheGuano]

If they don't tell anyone, I guess they're willing to go around testing all 10,000 footballs everyone is thinking about bidding for on ebay.

I'll take those odds

[Red Flayer]

"The chance of replicating this exact DNA sequence is one in 33 trillion, so it's virtually impossible."

I'm not saying that the chances of replicating the exact sequence are good, but you figure people involved in sport would know better than to assign odds that long.

Working from known sequences that fluoresce under laser stimulation, I bet they could narrow the odds down, to say, oh, a billion to one. Not that it matters, since what they'll be testing is not the base sequence, but instead whether laser + pig bladder = fluorescence.

So beating their test just means guessing the frequency of the laser.

I'll bet $100 on 100,000 different reproducable frequencies ($10M in bets) and I figure one of them will hit... even if they take a 5% vig, I'm still making out with 3.135 QUADRILLION dollars.

Take that, Dr. Evil.

Re:Not a zero sum game.....

[AstrumPreliator]

I didn't mean to imply the technology was useless. It may very well have good applications. Putting synthetic DNA on a football is not a good application. I was actually ready to burn some karma on that comment as I'm very against sports where a guy gets paid millions to toss a ball or anything along those lines. Priorities are absolutely terrible in 1st world countries. I mean I know leisure activities are important but I don't think they're as important as we make them out to be. I would much rather go play a game of football than watch one.

I'd like to note that if a certain technology is needed it will be developed, manufactured need or not.

Re:Whow...

[Moofie]

I agree with you that sports are valued too much, but you're pretty silly to assert that the United States had anything much to do with this ridiculous invention. It was a private company looking to take advantage of peoples' rapacious, irrational interest in "authenticity".

If the Franklin Mint can create authenticity, it must not be that valuable.

Re:Not a zero sum game.....

[kfg]

This has translated into practical, useful things such as Gatorade. . .

Otherwise known as "Florescent Sugar Water."

With a pinch of salt.

Took nearly minutes of research to whip that up.

KFG

Re:odds for random or deliberate attempt??

[The Wooden Badger]

It just occurred to me: There are only 4 nucleotide bases in DNA, so they give the ballpark figure of how long the strand of DNA is. That was awful helpful of them. They just pulled back on the trigger of their 9mm and shot themselves in the foot. And I bet someone on the inside just sells the "recipe" to the highest bidder.

Who cares?

[mh101]

If someone's stupid enough to pay thousands of dollars to buy a football just because it was supposedly used in a Superbowl game, then they deserve it if they get conned.

Similarly, I don't get all these auctions where an article of clothing sells for huge sums of money simply because a celebrity wore it once. Why's it suddenly worth so much more than getting the exact same thing from a store?

Security through obscurity (sort of) and human eng

[bobdotorg]

I'll bet that the odds are less than 33 trillion to one that you could bribe someone who works for the synthetic DNA company to pilfer a sample for you.