Sep 11, 2020 11:11 PM
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02545-5
EXCERPTS: . . . The assailant had left traces of blood at the scene, and the detective in charge of the case, Mark Taggart, made a personal plea to GEDMatch’s founder, Curtis Rogers, for access to the database. When it was granted, Parabon, which had initially refused the case, signed on. The company traced several partial DNA matches to individuals living in the area, and narrowed in on a suspect, a teenaged boy who was a relative of one of them. Taggart made an arrest.
[...] That proved to be a turning point for the company, and for forensic genetic genealogy. In the year since then, the restrictions on GEDMatch’s data have forced Parabon to chart a new path forward by returning to one of its earlier business strategies: attempting to use DNA to reconstruct faces. Parabon still offers a forensic genealogy service, but the restrictions have created openings for competitors, which are trying to stake their own claims in the field.
Just as the prominence of forensic genetic profiling has grown, so has its notoriety. Ethicists have raised concerns over China’s use of genetic profiling to target the Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim minority population in the country’s northwestern provinces. In the past year, the US government has launched two programmes that have begun taking DNA samples from immigrant detainees and some asylum seekers. The US Department of Justice issued guidelines last November that tried to set boundaries on the use of forensic genetic genealogy, but concerns about police brutality and systemic racism against Black Americans have raised questions as to whether these guidelines provide enough protection to people of colour, who are disproportionately stopped by police and overrepresented in criminal DNA databases. These legal, ethical and social concerns — coupled with Parabon’s travails — have left industry experts wondering what’s next for forensic genomics.
“Because DNA is so powerful, we tend to see it as a silver bullet,” says Yves Moreau, a biologist and engineer at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. But law-enforcement agencies are using databases and techniques not designed for solving crimes or generating leads, he says. “It’s like a knife — people underestimate just how sharp they can be.”
[...] Steven Armentrout started Parabon in his basement to provide supercomputing services. Parabon’s first big breakthrough was in 2011, when the fledgling company applied for a US Department of Defense (DoD) grant to try to reconstruct a person’s appearance from their DNA — a technique called DNA phenotyping.
[...] Parabon’s goal was ambitious: rather than just telling police that a suspect had fair hair and green eyes, it wanted to provide a comprehensive analysis of someone’s ancestry and a composite facial sketch from a DNA sample. The procedure, dubbed Snapshot, was released in December 2014. Parabon says that since 2018 the police have solved more than 120 cases with the help of their genetic genealogy and phenotyping methods (the company declined to disclose the total number of cases for which they were used, citing ongoing investigations).
Other companies have also developed DNA-phenotyping strategies [...] which specialized in predicting physical appearance using SNPs ... Several academic labs are also researching DNA phenotyping. At Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, Manfred Kayser ... does not attempt to weave together different features to try to recreate a person’s face. Instead, he uses the individual traits (say, auburn hair and hazel eyes) as law-enforcement leads. He finds Snapshot to be problematic because the technology hasn’t been evaluated in the peer-reviewed literature.
[...] Sociologist Helena Machado at the University of Minho in Braga, Portugal, isn’t against law-enforcement use of genetic genealogy or DNA phenotyping, but says she’s concerned that work linking genealogy and crime might lead to biases against certain families or ethnic groups. “It might reinforce the idea that there is a higher prevalence of criminality in certain families,” she says.
[...] Both Armentrout and Kayser say that DNA technologies could help to reduce police bias by providing concrete evidence to bolster eyewitness accounts, and that DNA phenotyping could decrease racial profiling by providing more details on a potential suspect’s appearance to police. But sociologist Amade M’charek at the University of Amsterdam says this thinking is naive, especially given the incidence of police brutality against people from racial minorities. “If we don’t know the individual, often all we see is race,” she says... (MORE - details)
EXCERPTS: . . . The assailant had left traces of blood at the scene, and the detective in charge of the case, Mark Taggart, made a personal plea to GEDMatch’s founder, Curtis Rogers, for access to the database. When it was granted, Parabon, which had initially refused the case, signed on. The company traced several partial DNA matches to individuals living in the area, and narrowed in on a suspect, a teenaged boy who was a relative of one of them. Taggart made an arrest.
[...] That proved to be a turning point for the company, and for forensic genetic genealogy. In the year since then, the restrictions on GEDMatch’s data have forced Parabon to chart a new path forward by returning to one of its earlier business strategies: attempting to use DNA to reconstruct faces. Parabon still offers a forensic genealogy service, but the restrictions have created openings for competitors, which are trying to stake their own claims in the field.
Just as the prominence of forensic genetic profiling has grown, so has its notoriety. Ethicists have raised concerns over China’s use of genetic profiling to target the Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim minority population in the country’s northwestern provinces. In the past year, the US government has launched two programmes that have begun taking DNA samples from immigrant detainees and some asylum seekers. The US Department of Justice issued guidelines last November that tried to set boundaries on the use of forensic genetic genealogy, but concerns about police brutality and systemic racism against Black Americans have raised questions as to whether these guidelines provide enough protection to people of colour, who are disproportionately stopped by police and overrepresented in criminal DNA databases. These legal, ethical and social concerns — coupled with Parabon’s travails — have left industry experts wondering what’s next for forensic genomics.
“Because DNA is so powerful, we tend to see it as a silver bullet,” says Yves Moreau, a biologist and engineer at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. But law-enforcement agencies are using databases and techniques not designed for solving crimes or generating leads, he says. “It’s like a knife — people underestimate just how sharp they can be.”
[...] Steven Armentrout started Parabon in his basement to provide supercomputing services. Parabon’s first big breakthrough was in 2011, when the fledgling company applied for a US Department of Defense (DoD) grant to try to reconstruct a person’s appearance from their DNA — a technique called DNA phenotyping.
[...] Parabon’s goal was ambitious: rather than just telling police that a suspect had fair hair and green eyes, it wanted to provide a comprehensive analysis of someone’s ancestry and a composite facial sketch from a DNA sample. The procedure, dubbed Snapshot, was released in December 2014. Parabon says that since 2018 the police have solved more than 120 cases with the help of their genetic genealogy and phenotyping methods (the company declined to disclose the total number of cases for which they were used, citing ongoing investigations).
Other companies have also developed DNA-phenotyping strategies [...] which specialized in predicting physical appearance using SNPs ... Several academic labs are also researching DNA phenotyping. At Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, Manfred Kayser ... does not attempt to weave together different features to try to recreate a person’s face. Instead, he uses the individual traits (say, auburn hair and hazel eyes) as law-enforcement leads. He finds Snapshot to be problematic because the technology hasn’t been evaluated in the peer-reviewed literature.
[...] Sociologist Helena Machado at the University of Minho in Braga, Portugal, isn’t against law-enforcement use of genetic genealogy or DNA phenotyping, but says she’s concerned that work linking genealogy and crime might lead to biases against certain families or ethnic groups. “It might reinforce the idea that there is a higher prevalence of criminality in certain families,” she says.
[...] Both Armentrout and Kayser say that DNA technologies could help to reduce police bias by providing concrete evidence to bolster eyewitness accounts, and that DNA phenotyping could decrease racial profiling by providing more details on a potential suspect’s appearance to police. But sociologist Amade M’charek at the University of Amsterdam says this thinking is naive, especially given the incidence of police brutality against people from racial minorities. “If we don’t know the individual, often all we see is race,” she says... (MORE - details)