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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."
Personally, I'm in favor of this. Vast numbers of sex offenders and other criminals would be swiftly caught and punished. Oh wait, this is America - well, they'd be caught anyway. It's a privacy-vs-justice tradeoff I'm willing to make.
However, there is a much larger question here...who the frack cares what a college student has to say?
In other news, my barber thinks 9/11 was a conspiracy by the Bush administration. New York Times, I expect to see an editorial written by him published soon.
BTW, what's with the editorial "yes, you heard that right" - as if this is a completely shocking idea that hasn't been proposed about a hundred times.
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Arrested people forfeit their rights. Like the right of liberty (they are thrown in prison) or the right to be secure in their homes (the judge searches for evidence), or secure in their persons (collection of prints and DNA).
They still retain SOME of their rights, such as a trial by jury, but not all of them.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Yup. This guy is an idiot. How does he know government can always be trusted with the information, among other things.
In order to doubt whether the government can be "trusted" with this information, you'd need to be able to give us some kind of scenario where/how this information could be ab-/mis-used.
Summary says "Regarding the obvious issue of genetic privacy," and I fear the issue must be less "obvious" than the submitter thought, because I have no idea what "genetic privacy" might be. My genes are read a million times an hour by all kinds of mechanisms - some part of my own cellular apparatus, some part of external infrastructures like bacteria. I'm curious to hear where/how someone might get the idea that there is such a thing as "privacy" on the molecular level.
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