Identifying a Culprit In a Bloodbath 47
worromot writes "A group of geneticists published a method to determine if a given individual's DNA is present in a mixture (e.g., in a pool of blood on a carpet). An individual's DNA can comprise less than 1% of the mixture. (The article is in open access on PLoS Genetics website.) While this is a potential boon for forensics, there are more immediate worries about the privacy of the participants of the genetics studies that had been under way for many years. As Science magazine writes, 'The discovery that a type of genetic data that is widely shared and often posted online can be traced back to individuals has prompted the US National Institutes of Health and the Wellcome Trust to strip some genetic data from their publicly accessible Web sites and NIH to recommend that other institutions do the same.' The gravest worry was that an individual who had someone's genetic code could determine, based on the pooled data, whether the person participated in a disease study and whether they were in the disease group, or thereby glean private health information. NIH plans to ask institutions that have posted pooled data on their own Web sites to take these down, too."
UK government pre-empts this problem (Score:3, Funny)
Thankfully the British government and the NHS have been leaking private medical records en masse for years, cleverly sidestepping this issue completely.
God Save The Queen.
This will be horrible for false-positives (Score:5, Funny)
Imagine the number of people who may be implicated merely because they bathed in the blood without actually participating in any murders.