Don’t allow genetic stop-and-frisk
By Allison Lewis,
Newsday
| 03. 23. 2017
If you think the government wouldn’t target you as a suspect because of who is in your family, you might soon be proven wrong. A New York forensic oversight agency wants to unilaterally expand the use of the offender DNA database to convert relatives of those on file into default suspects.
This is familial searching, and the state Commission on Forensic Science wants to allow its use — though it is not clear it has the legal authority. Some states have outlawed it, some use it without legislative authority, and more have taken no action.
This is how it works: People convicted of nearly any crime in New York, including low-level, broken-windows type offenses, lose the right to genetic privacy. The state keeps a database of their DNA samples to compare with unsolved crime scenes. If no match to a crime scene is found, familial searching would expand the search to look for near matches, which means the relative of an offender could match the evidence. It also could generate innumerable false positives (innocent people), depending on the scope of...
Related Articles
It’s been a busy couple of months in biopolitics, with developments in the US, UK, China, Japan, and implicitly on Mars. Time for a brief roundup.
• • •
Bioethics needs an update
The National Research Act is now 50 years old. It was signed into law on July 12, 1974, as a direct response to publicity about the 1932 “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” The Hastings Bioethics Forum celebrated its anniversary with an...
By Robert Resta, The DNA Exchange | 07.22.2024
Medical geneticists and genetic counselors have an often complicated and at times tense relationship with people with disabilities, their families, advocates, and scholars. Geneticists are strong advocates and supporters for all of their patients, regardless of their abilities and disabilities...
By Katherine Bourzac, Nature | 07.10.2024
Image courtesy National Human Genome Research Institute
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is supposed to encourage effective medical advances while also ensuring that patients and research subjects are protected. This dual mandate demands tricky judgment calls that are made more difficult by outside pressures of several kinds, political, judicial, and especially commercial. This April story at Bloomberg examines one deeply troubling pattern of regulatory capture:
Americans Are Paying Billions to Take Drugs That Don’t Work
Companies are increasingly...