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Newborns' Blood Used To Build Secret DNA Database
Kanel notes a summary up at New Scientist of an investigation by a Texas newspaper revealing that Texas health officials had secretly transferred hundreds of newborn babies' blood samples to the federal government to build a DNA database. Here's the (long and detailed) article in the Texas Tribune. From New Scientist: "The Texas Department of State Health Services routinely collected blood samples from newborns to screen for a variety of health conditions, before throwing the samples out. But beginning in 2002, the DSHS contracted Texas A&M University to store blood samples for potential use in medical research. These accumulated at rate of 800,000 per year. The DSHS did not obtain permission from parents, who sued the DSHS, which settled in November 2009. Now the Tribune reveals that wasn't the end of the matter. As it turns out, between 2003 and 2007, the DSHS also gave 800 anonymized blood samples to the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory to help create a national mitochondrial DNA database. This came to light after repeated open records requests filed by the Tribune turned up documents detailing the mtDNA program. Apparently, these samples were part of a larger program to build a national, perhaps international, DNA database that could be used to track down missing persons and solve cold cases."
But, how is a blood sample from somebody born in 2003 going to solve a cold case? I guess a seven year old is prone to murder.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
Because the TFA certainly doesn't.
How, exactly, are anonymized blood samples going to used to track down missing persons or solve cold cases, or do anything else that hinges on tying a person to that blood sample? That is assuming you believe the samples were actually anonymized, which there's no way to know for sure.
I'm not defending what was done, but the only real use I can see would be statistical evaluation. Possibly a good idea, but the implementation (doing it without consent) is clearly wrong.
Merde, il pleut encore!
So there was no legal privacy issue, and no issue of legal property rights. And therefore the issue was moral or ethical, or that the legal system should be changed?
Anyone else agree or disagree?
Discuss... what kind of punishment should this yield?
The article brings up the specter of privacy violations without really explanation that the combination of the anonymized and mitochondrial DNA makes identification difficult. In fact, the article makes it appear that mtDNA is somehow more definitive than nuclear DNA. Yes, it was a violation of rights to collect and store the samples.
I'm wondering how 800 "anonymized" samples of mitochondrial DNA going to help solve any cold cases. First it's mitochondrial DNA which is not as distinctive as nuclear DNA. For humans, it links maternal parentage not individual characteristics. Second, it's "anonymized" meaning that using them in identification later is unlikely.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Typically if they take a tissue sample from you at the hospital, it belongs to them
No. It "belongs" to the being it was taken from. The being it was taken from has first "copyright"/"patent"/"trademark" to it (add whatever terms the lawyers feel necessary, here)
It does not matter who sequenced it first. It does not matter whether it has unique properties. It does not matter who it was taken from, whether they consented to it, or not.
No corporation, government, nor any other entity, can own anything about me that I do not give explicitly give them rights to.
Legislators can pontificate as much as they want to, there are things that we - as human beings - won't give up. This is one of them. History proves that.
If those in power wish to [continue] to do so, they will suffer the same fate as their predecessors have; they will eventually be replaced.
Fools.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
On the legal side, Moore v. Regents of the University of California is one of the most important cases on this issue.
As for your comment, you have an interesting political philosophy. Ideas like property and ownership are neither inherent nor immutable. Absent government, society, and laws, things like "property", "ownership" and "mine/yours" are pretty much defined by what you can physically control or prevent others from taking from you. So sure, you own your shit (figuratively and literally) as long as you can stop anyone else from taking it. State of nature and all that.
Of course none of us are in the state of nature anymore, we all live in societies with governments and legal systems that define certain sets of property rights and interests. I don't claim to be up to date on ownership of tissue issues, just recall that case from a class I took a while ago. But my point is that you make a philosophical claim about the nature of property and base it on a relationship between a human and an object. But property is fundamentally social: it is about a relationship between a human and another human with respect to some object.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
I decide who researches with my DNA
If Hitler had this technology, the Jews would no longer exist.
No need to throw in bullshit fantasy words like “copyright/trademarks/patents” in there.
It’s a physical object. The word is: OW.NER.SHIP.
You own your body. That is perhaps the single most foundational law of all laws ever written. (Countless laws use it as a base. E.g. all basic rights!)
So you own your blood sample. plain and simple. If they take it away from you, even as a baby, without your agreement, that is theft. Plain and simple. And a huge invasion of privacy too. Perhaps even bodily harm.
Of course as a baby, your parents are your legal representatives.
But about the rest of your comment: I completely and wholeheartedly agree!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
You own your body. That is perhaps the single most foundational law of all laws ever written. (Countless laws use it as a base. E.g. all basic rights!)
Yet the debate about whether or not a woman has the right to take chemicals to induce her body to flush a mass of cells that is forming inside her continues unabated.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Believe it or not, some of us already knew the context of this issue and brought in information from other sources. For example:
So basically, yeah, they destroyed the original blood samples. And you can opt out of them keeping such samples in the future. But they will keep the DNA they already have, and they will collect the blood and keep the DNA from it in the future.