Josh Gerstein over at Politico sent Threat Level his piece underscoring once again President Barack Obama is not the civil-liberties knight in shining armor many were expecting.
Diesel Civil Trust
(CNN) — When Annie Brown’s daughter, Isabel, was a month old, her pediatrician asked Brown and her husband to sit down because he had some bad news to tell them: Isabel carried a gene that put her at risk for cystic fibrosis.
While grateful to have the information — Isabel received further testing and she doesn’t have the disease — the Mankato, Minnesota, couple wondered how the doctor knew about Isabel’s genes in the first place. After all, they’d never consented to genetic testing.
![abbyjean:
After spending 35 years in prison for a rape that he didn’t commit, James Bain was finally released Thursday morning. Bain made five requests for DNA testing before a judge granted his motion. The testing eventually cleared him of the crime. Obviously, the state of Florida owes Bain a debt that can never be repaid.
[When exiting prison,] Bain shed his button-down plaid shirt for a black T-shirt that read “Not Guilty” before walking outside to address the crowd. Someone handed him a cell phone — the first time he has ever used one, he said. (via PostBourgie)](http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kuu0ol8VhM1qz8tzlo1_250.jpg)
After spending 35 years in prison for a rape that he didn’t commit, James Bain was finally released Thursday morning. Bain made five requests for DNA testing before a judge granted his motion. The testing eventually cleared him of the crime. Obviously, the state of Florida owes Bain a debt that can never be repaid.
[When exiting prison,] Bain shed his button-down plaid shirt for a black T-shirt that read “Not Guilty” before walking outside to address the crowd. Someone handed him a cell phone — the first time he has ever used one, he said. (via PostBourgie)
AUSTIN (KXAN) - When Andrea Beleno was expecting her first child, she never dreamed his blood would become the focus of a federal lawsuit.
Terror suspects are to be excluded from plans to delete DNA profiles from the national database after six years, under government proposals published today.
Imagine a world where medicine is guaranteed not to cause adverse reactions because it’s designed for an individual’s DNA.
Scientists in Israel have demonstrated that it is possible to fabricate DNA evidence, undermining the credibility of what has been considered the gold standard of proof in criminal cases.
The scientists fabricated blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor of the blood and saliva. They also showed that if they had access to a DNA profile in a database, they could construct a sample of DNA to match that profile without obtaining any tissue from that person.
Ministers’ proposals to hold DNA records of those falsely accused of crimes for up to 12 years has been attacked by Britain’s human rights watchdog for being unlawful and based on unreliable research.
In the last ten thousand years the human species has been in what Hawking calls, “an external transmission phase,” where the internal record of information, handed down to succeeding generations in DNA, has not changed significantly. “But the external record, in books, and other long lasting forms of storage,” Hawking says, “has grown enormously. Some people would use the term, evolution, only for the internally transmitted genetic material, and would object to it being applied to information handed down externally. But I think that is too narrow a view. We are more than just our genes.”
The time scale for evolution, in the external transmission period, has collapsed to about 50 years, or less.
Meanwhile, Hawking observes, our human brains “with which we process this information have evolved only on the Darwinian time scale, of hundreds of thousands of years. This is beginning to cause problems. In the 18th century, there was said to be a man who had read every book written. But nowadays, if you read one book a day, it would take you about 15,000 years to read through the books in a national Library. By which time, many more books would have been written.”
But we are now entering a new phase, of what Hawking calls “self designed evolution,” in which we will be able to change and improve our DNA. “At first,” he continues “these changes will be confined to the repair of genetic defects, like cystic fibrosis, and muscular dystrophy. These are controlled by single genes, and so are fairly easy to identify, and correct. Other qualities, such as intelligence, are probably controlled by a large number of genes. It will be much more difficult to find them, and work out the relations between them. Nevertheless, I am sure that during the next century, people will discover how to modify both intelligence, and instincts like aggression.”
$99 buys you, and a whole bunch of other inquisitive people better awareness of their genes with this DNA testing kit from the 23andme. Send a tube of saliva to a testing lab and check out your profile online. With an increasing number of medical and judicial proceedings pulling on DNA data and a continious trickle of whose-the-father paternity testing DNA is slowly but surely moving mainstream. Who’ll be the first to take individual’s DNA data and mash it up with dating profiles? Nature versus nurture? Bring on the hucksters.
DENVER - Anyone arrested for a felony in Colorado would be required to give a DNA sample under a proposal set to be debated on Wednesday at the State Capitol. Senate Bill 241 is called “Katie’s Law” after 22-year-old New Mexico graduate student Katie Sepich, who was raped and murdered in 2003.
Medical privacy advocates, ethicists say parents should be asked for consent before newborns’ screening samples are kept.
LONDON — Europe’s top human rights court Thursday struck down a British law that allows the government to store DNA and fingerprints from people with no criminal record - a landmark decision that could force Britain to destroy nearly 1 million samples on its database.
Nearly 1,800 people were added to the national DNA database every day during the past year.
Total: 1 of 1 Pages
