Yale Law Student Wants Government To Have Everybody's DNA

An anonymous reader writes "Michael Seringhaus, a Yale Law School student, writes in the NY Times, 'To Stop Crime, Share Your Genes.' In order to prevent discrimination when it comes to collecting DNA samples from criminals (and even people who are simply arrested), he proposes that the government collect a DNA profile from everybody, perhaps at birth (yes, you heard that right)." Regarding the obvious issue of genetic privacy, Seringhaus makes this argument: "Your sensitive genetic information would be safe. A DNA profile distills a person’s complex genomic information down to a set of 26 numerical values, each characterizing the length of a certain repeated sequence of 'junk' DNA that differs from person to person. Although these genetic differences are biologically meaningless — they don’t correlate with any observable characteristics — tabulating the number of repeats creates a unique identifier, a DNA 'fingerprint.' The genetic privacy risk from such profiling is virtually nil, because these records include none of the health and biological data present in one’s genome as a whole."

Comments

You got it.

[khasim]

The birthday collision illustrated:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

Even with 365 days a year, there is 50% probability that two people will have the same birthday in any random group of 23 people.

Now take 300 million people right now in the USofA.

Where is the evidence that these strings of "junk" DNA really are that unique?

Re:How does he know it's unique?

[HungryHobo]

several billion to one?

If the chances of any 2 individuals matching is 5,000,000,000 to 1
Then in a population of 214,597 people there's a 99% chance of at least 1 pair matching.

in a population of 300,000,000 there's going to be a significant number of doubles.