On 2005-03-22T15:48:19+0100, Eugen Leitl wrote:
Link: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/21/1937206 Posted by: timothy, on 2005-03-21 23:11:00
from the if-you-have-nothing-to-hide dept. [1]NevDull writes "As creepy as it may be to deal with identity theft from corporate databases, [2]imagine being swabbed for DNA samples as
When they take DNA samples, they use a handful of restriction enzymes and then blot the resulting dna chains. How do they digitize that to enable automated searching? What kind of tolerances do they use? Do they shift the blots vertically and compress or expand one of them to get the best match? What kinds of error margins does the digitization process introduce? I think privacy advocates are going overboard. I don't like DNA collection either, but there's no way a criminal can use southern blot profile data from a database to either compromise the individual's privacy or plant evidence at another crime scene. What's disturbing is that most entities that collect DNA keep the original tissue samples in storage. How long will it be until full DNA sequencing becomes cheap enough that they use it in serious cases (murder)? Craig Venter still has a standing offer to sequence wealthy individuals' DNA for $1 mil, doesn't he? Or was it a few million... I don't recall. They'd only need to sequence one chromosome, too, which should reduce costs. What's the actual cost of sequencing, per kb or mb (basepair, not bit)? -- Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter. --Hemingway, Esquire, April 1936