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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.
This is actually not that unusual. Typically if they take a tissue sample from you at the hospital, it belongs to them, and you have no property rights over it. For an extreme case, check out the story of Henrietta Lacks, who died of cancer in 1951. They took cells from her tumor, kept them alive indefinitely, and commercialized them. Her relatives didn't know about any of this until decades later.
As TFA notes, these blood samples were anonymized, and mitochondrial DNA cannot be traced back to individuals.
So there was no privacy issue, and no issue of property rights. And therefore the issue was...?
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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?
whosyourdaddy
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
* To identify races?
* To profile racial difference?
* To track individuals (and/or families), crime involvement, education level, whatnots?
* To look for certain special DNA strains?
BIG BROTHER knows no bound, does it?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Okay, let's split up the two issues, which are different.
Privacy:
IMO the absence of a privacy violation here is not just a legality. There was no violation of privacy at all in this case. Not violation in any legal sense, and no violation in any ethical sense. The mitochondrial DNA cannot be traced to individuals, so the individuals' privacy has been maintained. It's no more a violation of privacy than if someone had gone to the doctor with a case of syphilis, and the doctor duly reported it as a statistic to some government agency, with no personally identifiable information.
Property:
Re the property side of things, sure, please go ahead and make a case for this. What is the ethical problem with the current legal setup?
It seems to me that the current legal setup is the best one in terms of ethics. It allows medical research to be carried out, without making it necessary for doctors or hospitals to beg and plead and negotiate for the rights to study someone's cancer cells or whatever. Ethically, I don't believe that these people have any property claim. I expel my body wastes into the sewers without any expectation that the city will negotiate with me individually for the possible economic value of those wastes. When I cut my hair and nails, the cuttings go in the trash, and I don't expect the city to enter into a bargaining process with me about what they're worth. IMO we have a situation where there's no ethical expectation that parents will retain any property rights to blood samples taken in the hospital, and where there may be benefits to society in using those samples in various ways. Therefore I don't think it's ethical to allow individuals to veto the use of the samples from their kids. Should they be able to opt out? I don't see why. It would have a negative effect on society by biasing the sample.
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Let me explain to you why this is not as scary and outrageous as it would first seem. The summary and article are very good ones, but don't provide enough context for a non-expert to understand how serious/non-serious it is:
As the summary indicates and RTFA seems to confirm, DSHS collected the samples for use in anonymous human medical research. This is done all of the time, as another poster commented (and gave the great example of HeLa cells). Typically, an oversight committee reviews a great many details about your research plan and ensures your collection methods are sufficiently anonymous, and your research is done in such a way as to avoid revealing the identity of the sample if at all possible. (Usually, users are separated from the database maintainers, and the users never even know the identities of the samples).
As one example, co-worker of mine receives nasal swabs of infected children in Nicaragua, under the auspices of WHO and CDC. He screens them using very expensive diagnostic assays that aren't viable in the clinic but are useful for basic research. His lab has discovered several new viruses in these samples that weren't previously discovered due to geographic bias in clinical cohorts (you sample the people most likely to be able to pay for the cure). He never knows the names of the children, just age, symptoms, and previous infections. He has to renew his certification to work with human samples once a year to ensure he knows all relevant legal and ethical regulations, and must update his research plan regularly, and receive annual approval from the oversight committee, even if he doesn't change anything. (And must stop all research if he procrastinates and certification lapses) However, without being able to use these samples, both basic research and clinically relevant research would be hampered. DSHS probably operates in the same way.
The issue here is that these samples were passed to the federal government and they used them to build a DNA database. People sued primarily because DNA is considered very personal information in this country and having the government track you using it is a current moral panic/boogeyman. (Partially warranted, partially not). In this case, however, they were using mitochondrial DNA, which is separate from your normal chromosomal DNA. Because sperm have no mitochrondia, all of your mitochondrial DNA is passed matrilineally (i.e. from mother to child-- sons cannot pass it on at all). Because you only have one copy, it does not undergo recombination during sperm/egg generation, and thus changes very very slowly. As a result, people like the National Geographic Society are using the information to trace human migration patterns throughout history using mitochondrial sequence information (google it). However, because it's so similar from person to person ---it is unlikely to be able to be traced directly back to you or identify you the way your chromosomal DNA is--- instead, it can tell where your mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother came from, i.e. your ethnicity. With enough samples it may even be able to tell whether you are a recent immigrant, a long term american, etc. This means that, using this database as a source, police may one day collect mtDNA from a crime scene and know they are looking for a person from Eastern Europe that is 1st-3rd generation american. That is, it can be used to narrow suspects, but can't be used to identify you directly.
So, in the end, the information (at least to me, as a molecular biologist) is relatively harmless and perhaps even good, in balance. However, given the serious objections people would likely have if they had known their information would be used in this way, the oversight committee should have required additional consent to use and collect this information for each person's sample they collected (and insured the people who gave consent gave informed consent). That would have avoided the mess entirely, and been more ethical.
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
You are wrong. When a person discards human waste, hair, nail, urine, feces, saliva, blood, cancer cells or whatever there is no legal expectation of privacy or property as you say. However when a tissue sample is given there is an expectation that it will be used ONLY for the purpose for which it was given. Any other use without the explicit permission of the owner is wrong and should be prohibited.
If a person drinks from a soda can and then discards that can then any DNA on the can, assuming traceability, can be used in a criminal case but if the person keeps the can then discards it without traceability then it cannot.
In the case of whether a doctor would need permission for a tissue sample to be entered into a database or some other and especially commercial use would be clear. A person's tissue is his property and cannot be used for purposes other than what he has explicitly permitted. In the case of the cancer patient you mentioned her body would become property of her estate and any use commercial or otherwise would need to be approved by the patient's heirs. If profits are made from a tissue sample then the heirs are entitled to royalties.
The idea of negative effects upon society by enforcing privacy and property rights are simply well, socialistic.
Edwin
The post you're responding to was specifically about the ethical issues involved, not the legal ones. However, your post seems to be entirely a description of what you think the law says. You're incorrect about the law. (I assume we're talking about U.S. law here, since TFA was about something that happened in Texas.) Common law has said since Haynes' Case, in 1613, that bodies and parts of bodies are not legal property. This principle was upheld in the U.S. in 1990, in Moore v. Regents of the University of California, which ruled that a cancer patient had no property right relating to the commercial use of his cancer cells. The most recent case to uphold the same principle was Washington University v. Catalona (2006), in which patients sued to get back their samples of prostate tissue, blood, and DNA, and the court ruled that the samples were not their property.
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I decide who researches with my DNA
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.