Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Well, fuck.
they have to rewrite next season of CSI because of this
What sort of budget do they have to have to do this to you? How much will that go down in the next 5, 10 and 20 years? Hmm...
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
Company selling test to detect whether this has happened shows off a tech demonstration of why their product is necessary.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Ok folks, don't get yourselves in a tizzy over this.
If you read the article (yeah, I know, it's against Slashdot rules, but give a try anyway) you'll see that all this hype originates from a company that has a product to detect faked DNA evidence, that they hope to sell to forensics labs.
The simple fact is that if someone wants to plant your DNA at a crime scene, there are many possible ways for them to obtain *real* DNA to use for that purpose. They aren't going to go through the hassle of creating fake DNA...
Don't tell me to get a life. I had one once. It sucked.
Really? It's that easy? God, I'm an idiot. After I cloned the tiny snippets of the common variants, creating my library, I just sat there staring at them and thinking "What the hell do I do now?"
Whole genome replication seems to mostly center around Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR). PCR is an incredibly versitile technology. PCR machines cycle test tubes through specific temperatures, the thermal cyclers are cheap compared to a lot of lab equipment but still in the thousands of dollars. To do a PCR also requires some type of polymerase, nucleotides, some solutions, and short primer oligonucleotides. These are all items that aren't prohibitively expensive but aren't household items either.
Maybe I'm being too ACLU/tinfoil hat, but I'm getting a sinking feeling that someone eventually is going to try to slap some regulations on PCR, or at some point in the future, having access to a thermal cycler and PCR materials is going to be seen by law enforcement as a reason to be suspicious of you. And I think that would be a real crime. I could see a future where thermal cyclers come down in price even more, maybe high school kids will start tinkering around with PCR as kids from yesteryear played with chemistry sets before we decided they could be used to make bombs and should be banned.
Maybe not. Anyway, I think we should nip it in the bud if there's any hint that law enforcement starts thinking you need to have a good reason to manipulate DNA, just so they can keep their evidence unquestionably true.
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.
At the moment most (if not all) DNA profiling is done by examining STRs. STRs are specific spots in your DNA where a certain pattern of DNA is repeated a number of times. And the number of times it's repeated might be different for you from the STR at that spot from someone else.
So if you check many of these spots, you can make it extremely unlikely that someone else has all of these spots with the same number of repeats as you do. In the US they check 13 loci. And this fake DNA (the stuff they advertise as being possible to make just by looking in the database, with no original genetic material) is just a load of these loci, with the correct number of repeats in there.
The reason it isn't much of a problem is that the technological bottlenecks that made the human genome project such a money pit are close to gone now. Taking a genetic sample and fully sequencing it shouldn't be that much of a problem in the next few years (I mean you can already do it for the price of a coat. To proof against fake evidence, many other SNPs or STRs can be checked instead, as a confirmation. Keeping a list of another 13 STRs to be used as confirmation would be a good start, having the loci known but not recording the results in databases to prevent this kind of counterfeiting.
You can also do it based on in the DNA information for the standard 13-site tests typically kept in databases. That effectively allows you to frame somebody without ever coming close to them. Which could be important if your target is a 250lb outlaw biker or a paranoid schizo with a criminal record. But as someone else pointed out, this isn't a surprise to anybody that has an understanding of how these tests work, as well as understanding the potential usefulness of DNA manipulation for motivation in advancement of the state of the art.
Did you give the police a sample of your kids' DNA in case they ever got lost or kidnapped? If you really are concerned about the extremely long odds that that would happen, you might have been better off taking the sample, freeze drying it in your freezer and putting it in a safety deposit box rather than handing it over so that it can go in a database somewhere. Seriously, if I were growing up now instead of decades ago, and later found my parents had done that when I was a child, I would be seriously angry. Because now that the police have the sample, they can retest it to match whatever increase in gene fragment sites is used to "decrease the chance of an accidental or falsified match". Storage is cheap enough that in the long run they'll probably wind up tracking all the thousands of possible human DNA gene variations since it's only about 20,000 or so genes. At which point someone can just fake up some introns and insert them randomly to make a pretty convincing copy without ever being near the intended target. Sounds ludicrous now, but it will be borderline trivial in another few decades. Five years ago, most people (particularly those in the law enforcement sphere) would have labeled the scenario described in the article as paranoia.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
In order to 'engineer' a crime scene, to incriminate somebody by planting fake DNA, the first thing I need it a real, if tiny, DNA sample, perhaps from a strand of hair or a drinking cup. Then I use that to fake some DNA, which I place at the scene.
So can somebody tell my WTF, if I already have some legitimate DNA from the person I'm attempting to frame, I wouldn't just place that at the crime scene instead?
It helps to have the right sort of DNA. Say you want to frame someone for robbery, and you have their semen -- I guess you could argue that they are obsessive chronic masturbators and that's why their semen is all over the crime scene -- but otherwise, it would arguably raise less suspicion to find other sources of DNA.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
"This undermines the credibility of what has been considered the gold standard of proof in criminal cases. "
It doesn't. The credibility still lies with the lab scientists themselves handling the DNA samples, as the infamous OJ Simpson case showed.
Back when I was in 2nd grade, I think it was, the police had a 'fingerprint day' at the elementary school. They brought in a 5 print card and offered to fingerprint every child 'just in case'. I asked my parents about it a few years back, they said the only reason they signed any form was that they got to keep the card, not the police. I think the police did offer to store all of the cards, again, 'just in case'. I mean, "what would happen if your child was kidnapped from the house and the kidnapper set fire to the house to get rid of the fingerprint card? I mean, think of the children!"
Not fabricating DNA, but certainly fabricating DNA evidence .
but we can't make a passable artificial vagina for under $100?
Sometimes a sham is better than the real thing. Consider:
Which would you rather be hit in the head with, a shamrock or a real rock?
Which would you rather rub in your hair, shampoo or real poo?
Which would you rather feel, champaigne or real pain?
In this case, the real deal is far cheaper than the sham. You can get a skinny hooker for $20. What's the difference between a crack dealer and a prostitute? The prostitute can wash her crack and resell it!
Clicking "no karma bonus" and "no subscriber bonus" because my comment is as offtopic as yours. Mine might at least be funny. Nice try, though.
Free Martian Whores!