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Mute Witness: Forensic Sketches From Nothing But DNA
First time accepted submitter Todd Palin (1402501) writes "Researchers at Penn State university are trying to reconstruct images of faces based only on a DNA sample of the individual. As far out as this sounds, they did a pretty good job at matching the actual appearance of the faces. This is a pretty good start on a whole new use for DNA samples. Imagine a mug shot of a rapist based only on a DNA sample."
You can look the same, but your fingerprints and DNA won't match up. Before we get to the boring stuff like where he was, what was he doing, his connection to x*y/z, possible motives etc etc. I assume you can tell twins apart with science/magic.
It's a helpful stepping stone in a criminal case, not the final nail. And I have a hard time believing any reasonable court of law would render judgement based on a DNA sketch without other concrete evidence.
Who can tell without DNA .
We all know DNA can be changed when you get married.
http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/Who_Shot_Mr._Burns%3F_%28Part_Two%29/Quotes
Marge: The police have such a strong case against Homer! Mr. Burns said he did it, they found his DNA on Mr. Burns' suit.
This is bullshit.
How can DNA tell if a person is skinny/fat has a mustache/ is shaved or has tattoos?
Maybe someone bit off his ear when he was young.
The problem is that this kind of thing makes the police go on fishing trips. Round up everyone who looks a bit like the sketch and ask them for a DNA sample. If they refuse they become a suspect.
The police in the UK have done it that way many times. Ask everyone in the area of a crime to submit DNA samples, often hundreds of thousands. People who refuse to "rule themselves out" by providing a sample are brought in for questioning and investigated, because privacy is no defence in their eyes.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You're really not seeing how a rough picture of the perpetrator could help solve crimes, simply because many people will share the same rough picture and have some similar underlying DNA?
Right now DNA often comes in near the end of an investigation; you have to select people to test based on traditional detective work, and then you must legally acquire their DNA to match with your sample. If suspects don't want to give you DNA simply because you asked nicely, you have to be fairly sure of their guilt - and able to convince a judge of why you're sure - before you can get their DNA involuntarily. If this test became effective, the sample you got at the beginning would show you who among the likely suspects to test against, and probably lower the bar for getting legal clearance to take their DNA.
Not to mention you clearly have no clue how DNA testing really works; if it's important you can and will be able to match a decent sample to one and only one person. There are commonplace genetic tests that can produce 1 in 10 trillion profiles of a person's or sample's DNA to match against. The fact that this DNA processing produced a rough sketch matching X number of people is irrelevant when you'll be able to narrow that group to very few or one with the most basic detective work.
I'm somewhat surprised that neither the article or summary mentioned how this seems inspired by Gattaca.
Well, they always had access to it, but they just could not make it useful by mapping it to a specific identity.
I wonder how many unique individual DNA can be extracted on average by taking a sample of rain run-off from a busy city street? Let me coin the process here as "Gutter Diving."
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
Imagine when they investigate 100 sperm donor siblings or "cousins"...
Nobody have seen twins that don't look even like brothers/sisters? :/
The problem is that they are not matching the entire DNA sequence base pair by base pair like a complete DNA sequence, but only sections of it!
The test is like a hash function. The possibility of the match to someone else is very low, but not zero. Using that to generate a list of suspects which the police can narrow down based on additional evidence is fine. If that's the sole evidence for a trial, then there is a problem.
would it be necessary to come up with an approximate facial image? If you have the DNA sample, that is far more definitive than the approximated face. I don't understand how this is useful. It might be interesting, but I don't see any practical use in forensics.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
looks costly? we pay for that too... not even counting our spiritual bankruptcy. guy should get a purple heart too.. kids marching all over the world now so what gives?
Using that to generate a list of suspects which the police can narrow down based on additional evidence is fine. If that's the sole evidence for a trial, then there is a problem.
Well at that point I guess they'd get a torture warrant.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Plastic surgery FTW, eh?
Ok, in seriousness, I could see this as a great tool for anthropologists, but so far as crime-solving goes, it's just about guaranteed to have a false- positive rate about 100x the true positive rate. OTOH, that works for the TSA...
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
I fished around the links in the article, including http://www.plosgenetics.org/ar... and it looks fascinating. But we really need to see more samples. The one of the reporter is quite good, but let's see them do it again.
Gently reply
DNA analysis indicates the perpetrator is a black male. DNA sketch artist draws a stereotypical black male . Police nab the suspect and he looks kind of similar to one of the sketches. Then claim success that sketch artists are able to make positive matches on sketches based on DNA!
DNA analysis indicates the perpetrator is a male asian. DNA. Sketch artist draws a stereotypical male asian. Success!
Next up, DNA analysis indicates that the suspect is a female caucasian of mixed european ancestry. DNA sketch artist: On no! we're screwed!
And I have a hard time believing any reasonable court of law would render judgement based on a DNA sketch without other concrete evidence.
Why? Are you ignorant of history? There is a long list of people who have been wrongfully convicted because jurors were won over on fancy sounding but faulty DNA evidence.
http://www.innocenceproject.or...
Interview with Kayser ("we've only found the first five genes"): http://www.scientificamerican....
In short: Hair and eye colour prediction: 0.9, height: 0.75, everything else "much lower" than 0.75 with 0.5 being totally random.
And from the article itself: "The next step is to run larger studies in different populations to confirm that the variants found so far are statistically reliable." which explains why there aren't any more test examples.
A bit about how it works ("Fine Tuning of Craniofacial Morphology by Distant-Acting Enhancers"): http://www.evolutionnews.org/2...
Twins don't necessarily have identical DNA - identical twins do however have identical DNA.
http://www.newscientist.com/ar...
Ya can't ever get it right first try, can ya.
Right now, DNA comes in the first phase of the investigation in a lot of cases, especially in countries where the police can get DNA samples of large groups of people without a lot of paperwork and judges involved. Even if they need a judge for individual samples, they still use the characteristics to determine what ethnicity, eye colour and such the person that left their DNA at the crime scene has.
DNA almost always can't prove someone actually committed the crime, only that they were there at some point in time. If prosecutors are lucky, they can come up with some explanation why the DNA can only be left at the crime scene during or directly after the crime, but a lot of the time, that's not possible at all. Only in a very limited amount of cases DNA can be used to identify the perpetrator, mostly rape cases where semen was found and other evidence proves that it wasn't voluntary intercourse.
Really, DNA is rather useless unless you have a sample of a known criminal on file and you can match it to something that has to be related to the crime. Even then, it's common for criminals to contaminate crime scenes with "hair bombs" from barber shops or even items with traces on them stolen from a rival so they get implicated in a crime. Placing false DNA traces is much easier for criminals than placing fake fingerprints. DNA may serve as a tool to narrow down your search or find persons of interest but it seldom will do more than that.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
It's a nice story, and they provide a MatLab environment to play around with their model, but ultimately I don't believe this work is reproducible given the materials provided. All we're really given is a sandbox to play in where we can adjust model parameters, and so the work should never have been published.
What would convince me? For starters, the ability to take an arbitrary set of values for these SNPs, punch them in, and see the result change. If I put in SNPs from one of the CEU HapMap samples, I would expect to see a vaguely Caucasian face. If the individual is female, I would expect feminized features. Adding to this, I think we need to see more of the source used in the data wrangling. There's quite a bit of "and then this happened" in the methods.
There is a long list of people who have been wrongfully convicted because jurors were won over on fancy sounding but faulty DNA evidence.
http://www.innocenceproject.or...
Your reference is the exact opposite of what you claim. It is not about people wrongly convicted by DNA evidence. It is about people wrongly convicted with other evendice, that were supsequently exonerated with DNA evidence.
The suicide rate will definately go up when people are able to see what they will end up looking like.
OK, the police have a drawing of what the rapist might look like. Turns out I'm an exact match to the picture, but I decline to give a DNA sample. Do they have probable cause to allow the courts to force my hand?
Imagine a mug shot of a rapist based only on a DNA sample.
A whole new meaning for a facial.
Excuse me, I have to go vomit now.
Have gnu, will travel.
well, in their defense, this is slashdot.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Different kinds of dna evidence. his point is correct: this will just be another way to hand down verdicts to a bucha people who the jurors happen to think all look same.
I don't see what's wrong with that. If they were convicting people based on that, that'd be a different thing.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
She had cells on her from unknown sources. It would be great to have a look at the murderer that did this.
Think of how fast it would be to match up.
Interestingly, would courts require you submit a cell in future, if your pix appears to match one?
Also, I wonder if this can be used to capture others that are sitting in jail, but did the crime and simply did not admit to it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"they did a pretty good job "
SO the resulting picture showed 2 eyes and a nose and a mouth ??
I kinda doubt that and serious shape distinction beyond 'generic' can actually result.
Yes, took a while to find, but I couldn't have asked for better. You look about my body build and proportion. Same skin, eye and hair color. Seen in the dark or in passing in a hoodie, I doubt someone wouldn't be equally likely to pick either of us from a lineup. Ah, that was a fine cup of coffee, wasn't it. Well, in addition to dropping mine in that refuse bin too, I'm snatching yours out; Saliva, [x] Check. Oh, silly me, I just meant to drop in this napkin, not my keys and cup. How embarrassing! Seems it wasn't quite empty, good. Oh did I drop something small... Here? No, there my pen is, right next to a couple of your hairs in the seat you just vacated. Quick now, what's the time? "I'll be late", and left turn, was it? Crap, I lost you. That's OK, I know you'll be back around the same time tomorrow or the next day. Then I'll tail you proper for a few days and have your routine down pat to ensure you won't have an alibi when it's done -- There's bound to be a good spot for it along your commute. Might even pick someone you work with rather than a perfect stranger, I've got time, the build up is all part of the fun.
No one would ever think to do something like that! Who would believe all the evidence just happened to point to you as some elaborate frame-job, for what reason? Criminals aren't that smart, and certainly not murderers that leave their blood soaked hoodie with your own hair in it in their own garbage? Your DNA and fingerprints will match evidence at the crime scene: No prints on the body, but it was your first -- maybe a crime of passion, you're not a serial killer -- so you sloppily tossed your cup too near the body.
Evidence, Opportunity, but Motive? Oh, they'll think up some motive, nobody's perfectly innocent; Building narratives from confirmation bias is their job. My my, the jury won't need to hear a peep more once the prosecutor mentions where they found your saliva on the victim. I just LOVE Occam's Razor! Hope you get the death penalty, sucker! Heh, it's almost like two for the price of one.
(un)Fortunately, they stop looking so hard once they "like you" for a crime, and close the case altogether once the long arm of the law has "got their man".
... I -literally- went to high school with the sampled reporter.
"Researchers at Penn State ... Imagine a mug shot of a rapist based only on a DNA sample."
Such a case seems ironic given that this is the same university that was (recently) involved in a scandal related to such crime.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
So if you value your privacy and don't want your DNA on the police national database you should accept them coming into your home, taking away all your computers and mobile phones, questioning you for days and then having to explain all that to your wife and employer? Okay.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I don't see what's wrong with that. If they were convicting people based on that, that'd be a different thing.
OP didn't think he had to hold your hand down the trail that far.
From TFA: "The next step is to run larger studies in different populations to confirm that the variants found so far are statistically reliable."
So they don't care if you get sent to jail, even if you're innocent and a criminal goes free, so long as it doesn't happen 'too' often.