Slashdot Mirror
Identifying a Culprit In a Bloodbath
worromot writes "A group of geneticists published a method to determine if a given individual's DNA is present in a mixture (e.g., in a pool of blood on a carpet). An individual's DNA can comprise less than 1% of the mixture. (The article is in open access on PLoS Genetics website.) While this is a potential boon for forensics, there are more immediate worries about the privacy of the participants of the genetics studies that had been under way for many years. As Science magazine writes, 'The discovery that a type of genetic data that is widely shared and often posted online can be traced back to individuals has prompted the US National Institutes of Health and the Wellcome Trust to strip some genetic data from their publicly accessible Web sites and NIH to recommend that other institutions do the same.' The gravest worry was that an individual who had someone's genetic code could determine, based on the pooled data, whether the person participated in a disease study and whether they were in the disease group, or thereby glean private health information. NIH plans to ask institutions that have posted pooled data on their own Web sites to take these down, too."
Good luck with taking that stuff down. Posting something on the Internet is like spilling grape juice on a white cloth. If it wasn't made obvious by the age controversy over China's gymnasts, then I'll say it again: once something is on the Internet it stays there, no matter how much scrubbing you do. People need to think first and to not put something up if there is ever a chance it will be an issue.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Imagine the number of people who may be implicated merely because they bathed in the blood without actually participating in any murders.
A lot of SNPs and coding regions can be used to identify haplotypes- e.g. we might know that the probability of finding an A rather than a T at a particular base position on chromosome 3 is 90% for Asians and 20% for everyone else, or 40% of people with Huntingdon's and 90% of people without, etc. If you can gather SNP information from locations that are spread out across linkage points on different chromosomes, you can pretty much pin down the phenotype of the guy if any data has ever been gathered specifically mapping the phenotype distribution to the base pair probability. And if you're being genotyped, they'll know your race along with a lot of other phenotypic information about you from the paperwork they'll have you fill out.
This is a weird situation, because race is only one of many attributes you have that you have no control over, but we obviously single it out and make it a sore spot. Now that they can genotype bloodbaths, will we get lynchings of color blind guys to come from this? Probably not, but I can easily imagine something like this igniting racial tensions.