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?

Comments

Welcome

[thijsh]

Please leave your DNA with the school nurse...

Re:Welcome

[Quiet_Desperation]

Please leave your DNA with the school nurse...

Is she cute?

Both, of course

[spun]

Liberals tend to think for themselves, so I imagine we will see many different viewpoints emerge, rather than some lock-step, campus wide consensus.

Re:Both, of course

[spun]

No blacks with guns were filmed and called white racists. The majority of America supports health care reform. The Democrats have tried to be bipartisan, but the Republicans have stone-walled them. The conservative minority is fracturing, going crazy with conspiracy theory fueled rage. The deception from the right wing is astonishing: Obama is a Muslim, Obama is Kenyan, death panels, the list goes on. Meanwhile, Republican after Republican is caught doing the exact opposite of what they preach, usually in bed with someone not their spouse. Who are the deceptive fuckheads, really?

Re:Both, of course

[spun]

Sorry, but in order for people to be free, we need government intervention. Otherwise, the powerful oppress the weak. That was the whole reason we fought off King George, and we still need protection against tyrants, who now use economic coercion. Wage slavery is still slavery. Wall Street CEOs are the new kings, not Obama.

Re:Both, of course

[AthanasiusKircher]

Nope. Despite the propaganda put out by certain groups that do think in lock-step, liberals are fairly... liberal in their thinking.

Bullshit. Anyone who would ever accept the name "liberal" in the U.S. is already buying into the idea that there is only one possible spectrum of ideas, which goes from "conservative" to "liberal." Most people seem to think that any possible collection of political ideas should be able to be mapped onto that one-dimensional scale. If you actually were thinking independently, you wouldn't buy into this oversimplified (and inaccurate) model.

Liberals don't tend to hold the view that things are perfect just the way they are. Upholding the status quo means thinking the same thing: everything is peachy just the way it is and the old ways are best.

Here's a newsflash -- the reality is that a lot of ideas have been around for a long time. Those who are supposedly "liberal" may actually be wanting to go back to older ideas as well, or older ideas that were rejected in the past for various reasons. If you think that "conservatives" only want things to stay the same, take a look at the "neo-conservative" movement, which has actively tried to change society in the past few decades. In your naive conception of conservative/liberal, is it even possible to have a "neo-conservative"? You might argue that the neo-cons are actually trying to return to some deeper past, but we all know that's just rhetoric -- their idealized past never existed.

Instead, liberals are open to new ideas and new ways of looking at the world, so they tend to be more eclectic in their thoughts and ideals than some other groups.

That may have had some traction in the classic "liberalism" on the nineteenth century. Today, though, the vast majority of "liberals" are just sheep buying into a certain collection of ideas that certain people deem "liberal."

You want to be truly open to new ideas? Start thinking independently for yourself. Analyze every political question from your own perspective and logic, and decide what makes the most sense to you. The standard modern "conservative" and "liberal" positions aren't very consistent and make a lot of assumptions that don't necessarily make a lot of sense.

Re:Both, of course

[AndersOSU]

Someone who would be described as liberal in the US has what the rest of the world would call "center left economic opinions" - not socialist.

Libertarian, on the other hand means bat-shit-crazy wherever you go.

I'm torn

[Monkeedude1212]

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.

Re:I'm torn

[Kozz]

You said:

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.

There's an interesting related story here. From the article itself:

Members of the tiny, isolated tribe had given DNA samples to university researchers starting in 1990, in the hope that they might provide genetic clues to the tribe’s devastating rate of diabetes. But they learned that their blood samples had been used to study many other things, including mental illness and theories of the tribe’s geographical origins that contradict their traditional stories.

We all know what the majority of slashdotters probably think about the tribe's beliefs, origin myths, etc. But the fact is that the researches thought that once they had the material (the DNA/blood), they could crunch the numbers in attempts to answer many questions. But the donors of said material didn't approve all that was done. I'm not trying to say who is right or wrong, but it's a cautionary tale for any organization that wants to conduct research of this kind.

Re:Gattaca?

[Thanshin]

There's no gene for fate.

Maybe not, but there's one for AWESOME!

No. Sadly, I don't have it.

How quickly we forget: "posture photos"

[AEton]

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.

Privacy

[mollog]

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.

Re:Privacy

[NiceGeek]

People still believe in the NSAKEY rumor? How cute.

How is this different from

[Robert Heinich]

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

DO NOT WILLINGLY SUBMIT YOUR DNA!!!

[jtownatpunk.net]

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!

Re:DO NOT WILLINGLY SUBMIT YOUR DNA!!!

[Ixokai]

... umm, did you miss the part of the story where they *aren't* storing the student's identity with the DNA? I could walk outside for an hour or two and get a couple hundred random DNA samples from random strangers for study, and have absolutely no more idea who they belong to. Since our DNA just sort of falls off of us terribly easily.

The profiles aren't connected to students names, records, SSN, identities, nothing. Just a random number encoded in a barcode. The only way anyone can know that 123456789 happens to be you is if you tell them or show them your barcode.

Its research. And an interesting service.

Yes, the tinfoil hat wearing can argue that between IP logs and cookies and such, someone could probably figure out your identity if they really wanted to.

But then they can also just get your DNA from your *skin cells* that you shed all the time. And if they were going to be nefarious like that, the usage of that DNA sample for any random purpose against your interests would probably be legal: you have no expectation of privacy there.

Yes, it is

[snowwrestler]

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.