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Scientists Learn To Fabricate DNA Evidence
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that it is possible to fabricate blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor, and even to construct a sample of DNA to match someone's profile without obtaining any tissue from that person — if you have access to their DNA profile in a database. This undermines the credibility of what has been considered the gold standard of proof in criminal cases. 'You can just engineer a crime scene,' said Dan Frumkin, lead author of the paper. 'Any biology undergraduate could perform this.' The scientists fabricated DNA samples in two ways. One requires a real, if tiny, DNA sample, perhaps from a strand of hair or a drinking cup. They amplified the tiny sample into a large quantity of DNA using a standard technique called whole genome amplification. The other technique relies on DNA profiles, stored in law enforcement databases as a series of numbers and letters corresponding to variations at 13 spots in a person's genome. The scientists cloned tiny DNA snippets representing the common variants at each spot, creating a library of such snippets. To prepare a phony DNA sample matching any profile, they just mixed the proper snippets together. Tania Simoncelli, science adviser to the American Civil Liberties Union, says the findings were worrisome. 'DNA is a lot easier to plant at a crime scene than fingerprints,' says Simoncelli. 'We're creating a criminal justice system that is increasingly relying on this technology.'"
As a biochemistry grad student, I'd figure I'd need a month or so and could do it for less than $10,000 in materials not including a bit of a practice/training.
Materials - it costs about $0.15/base for small DNA strands, or $1/base for longer (>150 base) if you order from one of many companies. Enzymes run ~$100/enzyme good for about 50 reactions. You'd need about 5 or 6 critical enzymes. The PCR machine could be had for $500, or you could go old school with water baths and a timer. I bet I could get decent results with about $5-10,000 (not including labor, which would take a bit of time).
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Once you've created a library of the 'snippets' it would be almost trivial to clone up large mixed populations with the right signatures. (Trivial meaning less than a week, and a few hundred dollars).
As for price going down in the future - VERY fast. The tools to make/reshape DNA are still a bit arcane but have recently become both flexible and robust. There is an entire sector of private companies devoted to making DNA encoding & manipulation easier, faster and cheaper. Ordering 10,000-base strand now costs $1/base, but I would bet it pushes $0.10 within 5 years. Building it up from smaller (~100-bases) sequences is currently a bit of an art, but is not 'hard'. I would bet that that process will become much less arcane and therefore much more automated/programmable within the next 10 years to make that a matter of days of robot incubation rather than a month of grad-student labor.
1) Pass "homeland security" type law requiring people to register and submit DNA for national database.
2) Keep an eye out for political dissidents.
3) When they appear, have covert government agents commit crimes and plant "teh incontrovertible DNS evidence" of the dissident at the scene.
4) Dissident is taken out of the picture in a way that looks completely legitimate.
5) Bonus: Add extra brutality to their crimes to make the dissident (and by extension any of their ideas) less attractive to anyone else.
I was about to say that. If you want to frame someone, don't try to make sure you have an alibi while he doesn't. Collect his cigarette stubs, go through his comb and collect his hair, his chewing gums, his used condoms...
If you're a rapist, a trash bin next to a sleazy motel can be your getouttajail card.
All because we take DNA evidence as gospel. It's impossible to fail. Your DNA was there, so you were there. I don't even want to know how many innocent people are held behind bars (or worse, have been executed) based on planted DNA evidence.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Actually it is worse than that!
Here is why...
With a fingerprint we have always had doubt because it could be planted.
But with technology and DNA we are 100% sure! Well you get the idea, right? We trust technology so much that common sense goes out the window and hence if the beeping gadget on the floor says true, well then it must be true!
This has always worried me...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
The important question is, how many innocents have been framed?
I've always been sceptical about DNA proof. Not because I knew that samples could be manipulated like this but the unwavering belief that DNA traces at a crime sceen were indicative of involvement.
Take this example: A man kills a woman. You happen upon the scene just as the murderer has left. The victim is in her death throes. Now I don't know about you people, but my first instinct would be to try and help. To do so, I'd have to get close and touch her. Now imagine her clawing at me. She is dying, after all.
Now police finds you with a dead woman, your DNA under her fingernails, the knife used is lying mere feet away from you without any fingerprints or DNA traces.
How do you talk your way out of this one? Nobody could prove that you were the murderer, but there are some damning clues there, wouldn't you say? That's what scares me about 'foolproof' CSI methods. For each one I could think of a scenario that would incriminate the wrong person. What I missed with DNA was a certain scepticism. People went "His DNA was on her? Well, he must be guilty then..."
Actually, a well written CSI episode on this could be rather valuable for public education. If they made the important ramifications clear: DNA evidence can still exonerate, DNA evidence is still useful but you should consider that it has been planted, especially if it conflicts with other evidence, and therefore take it with a grain of a salt, and there are probably other ones, IANAFS (I Am Not A Forensic Scientist).
The problem is that DNA evidence has been showing problems for a while now. This is just the latest/greatest problem with it. It has been relied upon by law enforcement for a long time to "prove" something that law enforcement has known to not be true.
Several states (Arizona for one) did searches against the FBI's national DNA database and found several "matches" from different people. By match I mean that those each of those different people could have been convicted in a trial where the original DNA was found and used at trial based on the, at that time, current standard to prove that the DNA was effectively unique to that individual.
The FBI threatened to cut these states off from it's DNA database if they continued to look for these types of matches. The FBI then quietly "raised" the number of matching snippets required to be considered a definitive match. The article references 13 genomes, at one point only 7 or 9 was considered enough for a "guaranteed match".
Whom are you talking about? Given advances in bioengineering this was inevitable, sooner or later.
I've seen some awfully realistic-looking faked videos lately, too. Technology giveth, technology taketh away.
All because we take DNA evidence as gospel. It's impossible to fail. Your DNA was there, so you were there. I don't even want to know how many innocent people are held behind bars (or worse, have been executed) based on planted DNA evidence.
Whats worse is people being executed on other planted evidence. Disgraced former Illinois Governor George Ryan stopped the death penalty here when DNA proved that half of the men on death row were actually innocent.
A sword cuts both ways.
Free Martian Whores!
LOL. You couldn't have picked a better time to make that assumption, since I served on a jury less than a week ago.
In our case it was pretty clear cut that the defendant was guilty based on the evidence. After hearing the testimony, I think we were all reasonably convinced. Yet, we took nearly an hour to come to a verdict. A number of the jurors wanted to look at the evidence, to see for themselves that the testimony seemed accurate, and whether what was testified about could reasonably be possible. We went over each element that defines the crime, to be sure we were in agreement that it was met. For one part, we discussed what the law meant exactly to see if the condition was satisfied. We asked the judge if she could provide further clarification on the law. In short, we did not just simply convict...we had a nice little discussion to see if we could come up with any way that reasonable doubt could be satisfied for any individual element.
It was actually a very interesting experience. I went in not expecting others to be very analytical about the process. In fact, my expectations weren't too far off from what you suggest, but I was wrong. I was pleasantly surprised by the character of the people I served with.
As far as everyone else involved, the prosecutor could not have been more professional, and the same for the handful of cops that testified in the case. At least based on my experience, your cynicism is highly misplaced.