Human DNA is everywhere, from river water to soil to the air, including that of a crime scene, and now there are technologies to find it in DNA dispersed in the environment (environmental DNA), until now used to study biodiversity. The discovery, made by David Duffy of the University of Florida and published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, demonstrates the incredible potential of new genetic analysis techniques, but also opens up important ethical and legal questions on the possibility of being controlled, a sort of surveillance genetics.
The discovery comes from the analysis of the so-called environmental DNA, i.e. the genetic material that can be found in the environment left by the presence of animals and which provides important indications for knowing, for example, which species are found in that microenvironment. By analyzing the samples with next-generation genetic sequencing techniques, the researchers repeatedly and easily identified samples from colleagues who had simply collected the materials, to easily identify individual researchers.
It was possible using the increasingly advanced so-called ‘profound’ genetic sequencing techniques which, if on the one hand they allow us to obtain a lot of important information, on the other they also open up a series of ethical concerns. The risk is “unwarranted genetic surveillance,” legal expert Natalie Ram of the University of Maryland at Baltimore commented in Nature.
Surely an important advantage could come from crime scene investigations, but, Ram adds, “each of us continuously loses DNA and therefore investigative methods that exploit these sources of DNA (including environmental DNA) can be exploited to know or target each of us.” The risk is that DNA dispersed even in public environments, such as a supermarket, could be used, for example, for consumer profiling surveys: with improving technologies, it is essential, concludes Ram, to find the right and new balance between the possibility of preserving genetic privacy and for example to facilitate investigations.
Source: Ansa
I am a journalist with over 6 years of experience working in the news industry. I currently work as an author for Global Happenings, and my coverage focuses on Technology news. I have written for various publications, including Reuters, The New York Times and The Guardian.
