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Familial DNA Testing Nabs Alleged Serial Killer
cremeglace writes "A quarter-century of conventional detective work failed to track down the killer responsible for the deaths of at least 10 young women in south Los Angeles dating back to the mid-1980s. But a discarded piece of pizza and a relatively new method of DNA testing has finally cracked the case, police announced last week. On July 7, L.A. police arrested Lonnie Franklin Jr., 57, a former garage attendant and sanitation worker they suspect is the serial killer nicknamed the 'Grim Sleeper.' The key evidence? A match between crime-scene DNA and the suspect's son, obtained by a search through the state's data bank of DNA collected from 1.3 million convicted felons."
Why don't they find the serial killer gene instead
It's on the list. Right after curing cancer.
DNA fingerprints are not as random as many think. The markers used were not designed for a nation wide database situation. Hence collisions could be a big problem. That is two people with the same fingerprint (at least at the very small parts of DNA we look at) can in fact be very likely with a database this size.
I'm not saying he is innocent, but i don't think we should jump to the conclusion that he is guilty either.
In fact we may need to use SNPs (Single nucleotide polymorphisms) to be good enough for a database of millions (or eventually billions) to reduce collisions to acceptable levels.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
they had a guy four square for a brutal rape, but the guy was unconcerned. sure enough, the dna test came back and turned out he only shared half the dna with the culprit: the murderer must be the guy's brother
so they let him loose and track down brother after brother, sample his dna, and it turns out to be yet another brother. meanwhile, the woman who was raped is murdered, and they find a hair on her body that matches the original suspect's dna 100%
while examining the original suspect again, grissom sees that his skin is strangely mottled, and he has an interesting statue in his house: the legendary greek chimera
grissom cracks the case: the guy committed the rape because he knew he was a genetic chimera. the dna of his semen was the "brother" of the dna of his blood
http://www.csifiles.com/reviews/miami/bloodlines.shtml
a genetic chimera is an extremely rare individual in which fraternal twin zygotes are created, then fuse. so different organ lines in the body are from two different "individuals". you are your own twin, you are a mix of two people. there is also the real life case of a woman who became a criminal suspect because she was suspected of kidnapping: she claimed to be the mother of a child, but a genetic test reveals she was the aunt: her own ovaries weren't hers but from her "phantom sister"
http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=2315693&page=1
not that this is an argument against how they caught the grim sleeper, i applaud this use of genetic profiling of relatives to solve crimes. its simple sleuthwork, and plenty of innocent people come under suspicion all the time in criminal investigations that must be ruled out with basic detective work
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Cripes, that sounds like my crazy elderly dad. He thinks they should kill a murderer's family (you know, the people who *didn't* do the crime) in front of him. I keep explaining to him that serial killers are sociopaths who won't *care* if you kill their family (or even get off on it), but no go.
Oh, but you can. There's over 100 mutations in the genome per generation, so between any two siblings there's up to 200 differences. A complete genome decode would therefore certainly allow you to identify an individual. However, the police don't use genome decodes. They use much cruder methods of comparing individuals which will produce a fair number of false positives. Having said that, if you think you have privacy concerns now, wait until the police DO start using full genome decodes. And sooner or later they will. It's inevitable. Higher-grade intelligence, plus extra goodies like knowing what chemicals you might be sensitive to, is bound to eventually become too tempting. The technology will need to be cheaper and quicker, but that's just a matter of time.
I'm also expecting this kind of DNA work to be coupled with more sophisticated chemical analysis. If, as has been claimed, you can identify where a person has been by the chemical traces in their body, then some samples (such as blood) will likely contain those same traces. Once it becomes cost-effective and time-effective to extract that kind of extra information, it seems certain that it will become routine.
(It is unclear just how far you can go back, or with what level of detail, as far as geographic chemical tracing goes, but as some chemicals accumulate whereas others have a definite half-life in the body, it would make sense to say that geographical tracing has the potential to get fairly complex with time.)
There may well be other sources of information that have yet to be discovered or for which there are no tests (or at least, none that are well-known). For example, if there's a blood sample, it will likely contain red blood cells and may even contain trapped air molecules. That may tell you a little about the air quality at the time, placing additional constraints on both time and place of origin. No idea if it would be all that useful or cost-effective, but that's largely immaterial in comparison to the fact that clearly it is possible to imagine that further tests could exist. Once you know they can exist, you know that sooner-or-later they will exist.
(I'd be rather happier if there was a little more in the way of community policing versus some of the current practices, and if justice was a little more about balancing crime prevention via therapy and rehabilitation against the apparent need in society for revenge and retribution. It seems to me that if the criminal justice system had less reasons to be hostile, there would be less inclination to abuse that system from within. There will always be a lunatic fringe, but the smaller it is, the safer it will be to have such technology where it needs to be.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Really interesting story about a neuroscientist who studies the links between genes, neurobiology, and crime. He's always argued that genes determine behavior: serial killers are killers because of their genes and their brain structure. But one day, at the family barbecue, he learns that his family tree is full of violent criminals and killers, including the infamous axe-murderess Lizzy Borden. So as an experiment, he decides to do genetic testing and brain scans on his family. His mother, his siblings, his kids: all normal. No abnormal genes. No unusual brain activity. Except for *one* family member, one person who was tested and who has both the abnormal genes and abnormal brain activity linked with sociopathic behavior. The person? It's the researcher himself.
So, assuming the dude doesn't have a freezer full of dead hookers we haven't found out about, that would seem to argue that it's a little simplistic to argue that a gene or genes automatically turn you into a serial killer. Studies of mental disorders have long shown that these things are complicated. If you have an identical twin who's schizophrenic, odds are pretty good that you're going to be schizophrenic- but it's not even close to 100% of the time, it's more like 50%.
Let's look at this practically, though. Say that you find out your mother, your father, your brother, or your sister has a gene that is linked with sociopathic behavior. Should they be locked up or prevented from reproducing? What if a routine screening discovered that you had that gene?
Because their probably isn't one.
Or there is, but epigenetics plays a role in turning the gene on. So the gene may be present in a large part of the population (good luck filtering it out), but its not expressed in most of the carriers.
Its also possible that, even though this gene is turned on by some environmental condition, its continued expression can be handed down through several generations. So now, we's have to weed out those with the gene plus those exposed to the environmental switch. Plus descendants for several generations. Label someone as a risk because of what their grandfather did? Good luck with that.
Have gnu, will travel.