Family DNA Testing at the Border Would Be an Ethical Quagmire
By Megan Molteni,
Wired
| 06. 22. 2018
In the unfolding family separation crisis at the US-Mexico border, one thing has become increasingly clear; the federal government lacks any real plan for reuniting children with their parents.
On Wednesday, President Trump signed an executive order that would keep children and their parents together, though in indefinite detention. But the administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy reversal does little for the thousands of families currently waiting in US custody to be reunited. As WIRED and others have reported, the haphazard policy enactment has left asylum-seekers in a labyrinthine, multi-agency system rife with opportunities for records linking families to go missing or lack information. Especially for children less than a year old, it’s become distressingly difficult to simply match them to the parents they arrived with.
Amidst the turmoil, some concerned citizens have proposed an unlikely fix: Ship a bunch of spit kits to the border and start a DNA trail.
After pressure from a member of Congress and an outpouring of pleas on Twitter, direct-to-consumer testing company 23andMe has offered to donate DNA kits to help parents find missing children. Rival...
Related Articles
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...
By Jonathan D. Grinstein, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News | 06.26.2024
Partial screenshot from The Bridge Recombination Mechanism
video by The Arc Institute on YouTube (CC)
Buried in a family of mobile genetic elements, Arc Institute researchers led by Patrick Hsu, PhD, have discovered an RNA-guided system that enables modular...
By Carl Zimmer, The New York Times | 05.31.2024
Last year, Jaume Pellicer led a team of fellow scientists into a forest on Grande Terre, an island east of Australia. They were in search of a fern called Tmesipteris oblanceolata. Standing just a few inches tall, it was not...
By Liz Szabo, The New York Times | 05.29.2024
By the time Rena Barrow-Wells gave birth to her fourth baby in 2020, she was well-versed in caring for a child with cystic fibrosis. She was also experienced in fighting for a diagnosis of the disease, which runs in families...