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UC Berkeley Asking Incoming Students For DNA
peterofoz writes "The students will be asked to voluntarily submit a DNA sample. The cotton swabs will come with two bar code labels. One label will be put on the DNA sample and the other is kept for the students' own records. The confidential process is being overseen by Jasper Rine, a campus professor of Genetics and Development Biology, who says the test results will help students make decisions about their diet and lifestyle." No word in the story on just what "confidential" means — who will have access to the results, how long they'll be kept, or what else they might someday be used for. Will the notoriously liberal Berkeley campus see this as a service or an invasion of privacy?
Please leave your DNA with the school nurse...
Liberals tend to think for themselves, so I imagine we will see many different viewpoints emerge, rather than some lock-step, campus wide consensus.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
There's no gene for fate.
Living With a Nerd
It's voluntary, so there is no invasion of privacy going on, when you give up your DNA willingly you can't be expected it to be held very strongly in confidentiality. It's kind of like that whole unsecured Wifi debacle. If you don't know exactly what they want to do with your DNA, you'd be a fool to give it to them. That is their mistake to make though, I'm not going to deny them that by saying this kind of action should be illegal.
If kids want dietting tips, or help on decisions, there are plenty of resources out there. I'm a little more paranoid at the idea of this becoming Comfortable. First its "Let us take your DNA to help you diet". Even if only 10% of people sign up, if they enjoy their results they'll tell their friends to partake in it next year. It will grow, until more schools are doing it. Then the elementary schools will do it. Then that confidentiality agreement will phase away, and there goes the neighbourhood.
I guess the only course of action is to warn people of the dangers and hope they make the right choice.
Maybe they just don't give a damn about potential research subjects' rights during recruitment, but permitting the solicitation to go out AS PART OF A FUCKING FRESHMAN ORIENTATION PACKET is beyond the pale. This research subject recruitment strategy is damnably coercive my view. Berkeley's IRB should be ashamed. Or better yet, replaced.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
I realize this is slashdot and all, but if you read the article it states: "Once the DNA sample is sent in and tested, it will show the student’s ability to tolerate alcohol, absorb folic acid and metabolize lactose."
Not sure if they will test for other things or not, but that's the list provided thus far.
> Will the notoriously liberal Berkeley campus see this as a service or an
> invasion of privacy?
It's only invasion of privacy if it's done by an evil "corporation" or other capitalist running dog. Everything a liberal organization does is for your own good and only a right-wing wacko would ever suspect one of failing to diligently and effectively safeguarding his privacy (especially when said organization is part of the state of California: you know they have only your best interests at heart and know better than you what you need).
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Did you notice it was voluntary? It's not a requirement. If a freshman doesn't want to do it, it appears they can just not do it. Not sure if people should be fired for offering voluntary choices to new students. I guess, however, in our coddled child society, choices might confuse and damage the young minds. If we don't spoon feed them and water everything down to the bare minimum, they might not be able to cope!
"Once the DNA sample is sent in and tested, it will show the student's ability to tolerate alcohol, absorb folic acid and metabolize lactose."
Not sure if they will test for other things or not, but that's the list provided thus far.
Frankly, I'm not sure you could survive college without knowing those things about yourself...
Living With a Nerd
Unfortunately with most bureaucracies (especially universities), voluntary things have a bad habit of being "required". For example, a student goes in, University bureaucrat just says "and give me your DNA sample." Most students having to go through all the horseshit, including having to give Social Security numbers, probably won't even think to ask if it is in fact voluntary.
Speaking of SSNs, those used to be voluntary and now they're required. And when that happens, school admin folks become very careless with personal data - universities are just horribly incompetent with student's personal information.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
It's voluntary from the college's point of view. The problem is that things that are voluntary from the school's point of view are things that students who are applying are strongly compelled to do. It's absurd, but higher education admissions are a game of signals, and high school students (And their parents) don't want to risk giving the wrong signals when there are thousands of people competing with them. This means that there's a strong incentive do anything "voluntary" on the application.
The school may not even be thinking this, because schools often think students' calculations about how to get in are just over-the-top and absurd. But the schools should be thinking this, because applicants at competitive schools will almost always make those calculations, no matter that the school says "Don't worry about it so much" in the left hand while saying "We only admit the very best!" in the right hand.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
I just thought I'd point out that the whole barcode thing is irrelevant. They may as well put your name on the sample, because as soon as you seek to turn in your code and discover the result, you're mapped back to the sample.
From TFA:
"The results of the test will be put in a secure online database where students will be able to retrieve their results by using their bar code."
There doesn't seem to be any indication that you'd have to identify yourself to retrieve the results - they give you a code, you enter it in & see the results. If none of the samples are linked to names, it doesn't really matter that you could look at other results. So I don't think you'd be mapped back to the sample.
There is zero reason why it couldn't be voluntary AFTER the students are settled on campus. Putting it in the orientation packet makes the incoming student vulnerable to parental pressure to "volunteer," and sends a message (regardless of the word "voluntary") that this is something expected of incoming freshmen by the University, not something one clueless researcher somehow conned the IRB into approving. It's an outrageous recruiting tactic that should never have been approved, ESPECIALLY for subjects who may be minors at the point of recruitment.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
From the 1940s to the 1970s, Ivy League colleges took naked pictures of every incoming freshman, supposedly for use in scientific studies of the students' posture.
I am not making this up. See, e.g., this Times coverage from 1995.
I'm not going to make any kind of normative statement about whether people should say Yes to Cal's offer, here, but just wanted to point out that weird-ass instrusions into student privacy are nothing new.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
Privacy used to be expected. Now I no longer expect it. I expect that everything that is done on the internet is viewed by someone, somewhere. In a discussion yesterday about Microsoft's NSAKEY, it was discovered that there was yet another hidden key embedded in Microsoft apps to allow the government access to your data. Brave new world.
Coming soon to your community; risk assessment of every individual, eugenics, fascism.
Best regards.
the Ivy League nude posture photos were taken in the 1940s through the 1970s of all incoming freshmen at certain Ivy League and Seven Sisters colleges, ostensibly to gauge the rate and severity of rickets, scoliosis, and lordosis in the population.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League_nude_posture_photos
Kids, DO NOT DO THIS!!! Ever! For any reason! Holy shit, do you have any idea how crazy this is? There are sooooo many ways this information could be used against you, both now and in the future that I could type for hours without even scratching the surface.
Once you give this data away, you can't take it back. You can't control it. You will have no way to know where it goes or who has access to it.
Berkeley students, you should be out marching and protesting right now. Your protests should make national headlines by Friday. Get to it!
BITE ME!
That is the only way they would get a DNA sample from me. And they better hold me down, or, I will use that technique to get a sample of their DNA.
Damn, how stupid have people become?
Read the article, please. The request is in the welcome package for new students, not the application. Thus, "signals" in the application process are not an issue. The only people getting the request are those who already know that they have been accepted.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Pretty easily. If the cops have access to your DNA, and they're searching through DNA for a suspect, there's a chance they'll hit upon your DNA. If it's not in the database, that's not possible. Imagine the DNA database is a phone book. They're looking for Tom Smith, your name is Jon Smith, they misread things and arrest you. If your name was never in the phone book in the first place, that would never have happened.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
(cue Charlton Heston voice)
pour it from my cold, dead keyboard!
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
UC Berkeley's campus isn't liberal. It's got the most stereotypical frat/sorority ghetto I've ever seen. Its budget is stuffed with defense contractor and other giant corporation contracts, especially oil and telecom corps. Its law school hired John Yoo, the Bush lawyer who wrote the US torture regime rationalizations.
The list goes on. But these "Conservative" (corporatist, or worse) activities are defined by being exclusive, even covert, even secret. While Berkeley's actually "liberal" (or whatever's not "Conservative") activities are usually defined by being public, even extroverted. Then take the mass media's interest in hiding the "Conservative" activities behind a distracting "liberal" show, and you get Berkeley a reputation for being "liberal".
--
make install -not war
With flamebait lines like that, I don't know how you got a +5 insightful.
As far as one-dimensional thinking goes, yes, everybody knows the liberal-conservative axis is just a loose approximation. Assigning the left-center-right label is sort of like PCA. I read liberal blogs often and I note plenty of eclecticism among liberals; they're not sheep. For instance, all last summer and fall there was tremendous kerfuffle about the scope, shape and size of health care reform. There was lots of disagreement among liberals. So, you are mistaken.
Indeed, the vast majority of judgments about "the vast majority" are bullshit. :-)
$META_SIG_JOKE