Word: dna
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...incredible for some people's taste, however. Once a database like this is assembled, civil rights advocates argue, it is unlikely to be disassembled, and it is only a matter of time before data grow to include not just wrongdoers but also law-abiding citizens. Proponents of DNA testing dismiss this as libertarian alarmism, but experience suggests otherwise...
...December the police commissioner of New York City recommended that anyone even arrested for a crime--never mind convicted of one--be required to submit a routine DNA sample. In England, where a genetic database has operated since 1995, suspects are routinely screened this way--more than 360,000 gene prints are online--though police do promise that such profiles will be scrubbed from the record if the person is cleared. English officials investigating a crime in a small town sometimes perform mass screenings in which thousands of people are asked to surrender a mouth swab full of DNA...
...problem for Bereano and other detractors is that DNA technology works. In England as many as 500 matches are made a week between database entries and samples taken from crime scenes. When mass sweeps are conducted, the police claim a 70% success rate in cracking the crime they're investigating. In the U.S., where the months-old national database has barely got on its feet, the FBI claims that 200 outstanding cases have already been solved. What's more, on occasion, DNA sampling benefits not only the people investigating crimes but also the people convicted of them. Since...
This kind of investigatory yin and yang is keeping opponents of DNA fingerprinting mollified--but for how long? Now that the gene genie is out of the bottle, there may be little that can be done to stuff it back in. Scientists in the U.S. and England already speak dreamily of moving beyond testing STRs alone, expanding their work to sample other--more richly encoded--areas of the genome. Kevin Sullivan of England's Forensic Science Service predicts that within a decade researchers may be able to use DNA analysis to draw a sort of genetic police sketch...
...most complex traits, of course, would be the ones even the best detectives would have a hard time seeing: personality traits. If temperament is at least partly determined by genetic hard-wiring, somewhere in the vast tangle of human DNA there must be strands that influence behavior--including criminal behavior...