Category Archives: Transhuman News

Science Daily

Traffic-related air pollution linked to DNA damage in children Science Daily The study adds to previous evidence that air pollution causes oxidative stress, which can damage lipids, proteins, and DNA. Research has suggested that children may have different telomere shortening regulation than adults, which might make them more ...

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Traffic-related air pollution linked to DNA damage in children - Science Daily

Idaho Statesman

Boise State gets federal grant for post-conviction DNA testing, but not on Idaho cases Idaho Statesman The Idaho Innocence Project will benefit from a $630,000 U.S. Department of Justice grant to test DNA in possible wrongful-conviction cases. But none of the money can be used on Idaho cases, and the grant had to be given to Boise State University. Why?

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Boise State gets federal grant for post-conviction DNA testing, but not on Idaho cases - Idaho Statesman

Reporter Bill Buell looks at his "ethnic makeup percentage" page, indicating his DNA history, provided by Family Tree DNA.

"Pride of ancestry never possessed my soul."

It's an early 20th century line uttered by a wealthy politician looking to gain favor with the working class. I always liked it, and felt as though it summed up the way I felt about my ethnicity. Yet, I was curious. and while I often feigned my disinterest - and some of the time it was genuine -- I never seriously engaged in researching my family tree. Until now.

Like many Americans across the country and peoples throughout the world, digging into the past is becoming something of a hobby for me. Perhaps I'm not as passionate as some, but with the internet putting just about everything at your fingertips, and the recent popularity of DNA kits providing a detailed breakdown of your ethnic makeup, information about the past has never been so easily accessed.

When earlier this year I had the opportunity to provide Family Tree DNA with some saliva free of charge (saving me around $90), I jumped at the chance. I waited for the kit in the mail - a small package with a couple of cotton swabs and some clear tubes - did what I had to do and then sent them off in the mail. Typically it takes about five or six weeks to get the information back to you, and I have to admit I was quite anxious to see what I'm made of.

According to family lore - much of it provided by my older brother - we were mostly German on my mother's side and Welsh, German and Dutch on my father's side. As it turned out the oral history was pretty accurate. When I opened the email from Family Tree DNA that day, I clicked on the link and discovered that I was 95 percent European and 4 percent West Middle Eastern. The European part of me (by the way, I am a blue-eyed blonde) was also broken down into 80 percent West and Central Europe and 15 percent British Isles.

While the results of the DNA kit were interesting but pretty much confirmed what I had already suspected, other people can have a much more dramatic experience.

Albany's Sharon Smith, who was adopted at birth, spent years trying to find her natural birth mother but never succeeded. However, a few months after sending in her DNA kit to Ancestry.com, Smith got an email with a huge surprise. When she opened it up and clicked on "matches," she found a new woman's name with a "relationship range" of "mother-sister."

"I was shocked, I never saw it coming and never thought it was going to happen, but when I opened the email they had found my biological mother," said Smith. "I was very lucky because she just happened to do a DKN kit herself, and we were so closely matched it had to be my mother. I never thought I was going to find her in a million years. I was very lucky."

Smith contacted the woman, who confirmed that she was indeed Smith's birth mother. The two have become close, and last week, Smith had a very special Mother's Day.

"Previous Mother's Days were always about my mom," said Smith, referring to the woman who adopted her. "This year was a very different situation. I am very happy to have a relationship with my birth mom, and I am very thankful she chose the woman she did to be my mom. So, with that being said, I am very blessed that I have had two amazing women who loved me so much to bring me into this world and to raise me to be the woman I am today. So this Mother's Day, I celebrated two special moms. Not many people can say that."

Schenectady's Don Ackerman, a retired social studies teacher in the Niskayuna school district, was also adopted but had little interest in looking for a birth mother. He just wanted to know where he came from.

"I had assumed that I was German, Dutch and English, but when I got my results back the bulk of me, 44 percent, was Irish," said Ackerman, who grew up in Syracuse. "My wife also did it and she was upset because she was also mainly Irish. She always thought she was Dutch. It was fun and interesting to do it, and I discovered I was 12 percent Scandanavian and 10 percent Iberian Peninsula. I also had 1 percent Pacific Islander. But I was an adopted kid, an only child, and I had a wonderful life so it wasn't about finding my mother."

Nancy Curran, a former newspaper columnist and critic for the Gazette and the now-defunct Union Star, has worked in the genealogy field for nearly 30 years now, researching her own past and helping others look into their family tree. The television mini-series, "Roots," raised interest in family genealogy according to Curran, and then the internet and now DNA kits have made the idea of looking into one's past even more compelling.

"I think interest has been steadily growing since the movie, 'Roots,' which came out around the Bicentennial," said Curran. "People were wondering, 'does my family have anything to do with this wonderful experiment we call America.' And then it was the advent of the internet. You used to have to drive to a major library, find some microfilm with an index that would tell you what other microfilm you should be reading. Now you just click away. Increasingly, more and more documents are being digitized. Almost everything is at your fingertips."

Curran has also used the DNA kit - she is 72 percent Scandanavian - but she likes to remind people that the results sometimes don't provide that much information.

"I think my takeaway from the DNA kits is that it is more likely to be confirmation of information you already have," she said. "If you're looking for a relative it's not always going to be dependable. So much of it depends upon whether anybody whose DNA would be helpful to you has actually taken a test. However, sometimes you do get lucky."

Family Tree DNA, Ancestry.com and 23andMe are among the major companies involved in DNA testing these days. It was Bennett Greenspan who founded Family Tree DNA nearly 20 years ago in Houston, Texas.

"I conceived the idea in 1999 and I took my first commercial order in 2000," said Greenspan, who had owned a photographic supply company in the Houston area. "I saw the digitization of an industry I was in, and every time I sold a digital camera I was cannibalizing my own business. I had to do something else and the DNA technology was very interesting to me. People were immediately very enthusiastic about the idea and things just took off."

Business hasn't let up.

"Last year was our best ever," said Bennett, whose parent company, Gene by Gene, does the laboratory work for many of the other companies selling DNA kits. "My guess is that it will continue to grow. The technology is so easy. I can remember when the first cell phone came out and I said, 'I'll never have one of those.' Two years later I had one and now everybody has one. Soon, everyone will know their DNA and people will actually know for sure if they're 20 percent Native American, 30 percent Irish or Jewish, or whatever."

At the Schenectady County Historical Society, librarian/archivist Mike Maloney gets many visitors to the Grems-Doolittle Library looking to fill in their family tree, and many of them have also gone the DNA kit route.

"I think the popularity of genealogy is still increasing due to DNA kits because it adds an extra level of excitement for genealogists as you can pinpoint what part of the world your ancestors came from," said Maloney. "TV shows like 'Finding Your Roots' add the celebrity aspect to genealogy, and our genealogy-focused programs at the historical society always draw a good crowd."

As popular as the kits are, if you're delving into your family history and looking past your ethnicity, the best place to be is in a library with access to a computer, in particular a library with a collection like that of the Schenectady County Historical Society.

"Increased access to records through the internet allow people to do a lot of research from home," said Maloney. "But here we also have wills, yearbooks, naturalization records, church baptisms and other primary sources. You can usually find a few researchers looking to break through genealogy brick walls at our library."

Originally posted here:
DNA kits keeping genealogy in forefront - The Daily Gazette

Since 2011, Ohio law has required that any person charged with a felony must submit to a DNA collection.

But a man now charged in connection with two rapes and one attempted rape in uptown Athens over a 10-year period starting in 2006 managed to avoid DNA collection when he was arrested by the Ohio State Highway Patrol for a felony firearm offense in November 2015.

Thus, Shawn J. Lawson, Jr., 26, was not arrested in connection with the alleged rapes until earlier this month, when a DNA sample was obtained from him after an alleged sexual assault in Lancaster two months earlier.

If law-enforcement had hit on the DNA match for Lawson after the June 2016 alleged rape in Athens, he at least wouldnt have been free to commit the later sexual assault hes been accused of in Lancaster.

Athens County Sheriff Rodney Smith and county Prosecutor Keller Blackburn have now worked out an arrangement where any person arraigned for a felony in Athens County Common Pleas Court will have his or her DNA collected by the Sheriffs Office unless that persons DNA is already on record.

Athens Police had been hunting for what they described as a serial rapist since at least January 2016. They suspected him of being involved in three sexual assaults in uptown Athens between 2006 and 2015. Lawsons grand-jury indictment states that the crimes occurred against three separate victims on June 11, 2006; June 20, 2015; and Dec. 12, 2015 (Lawson was arrested for an OVI/felony firearm charges on Nov. 22, 2015, and indicted in Athens County Common Pleas Court on Dec. 14, 2015).

The sexual assaults all occurred under similar circumstances, police have said, when the college-aged victism were walking home alone from the uptown Athens area early in the morning. Lawson would have been 15 years old at the time of the first incident in June 2006.

In the June 2015 case, Athens Police Lt. Jeff McCall used a technique called touch DNA to collect evidence, where DNA can be obtained from areas on the victims body that a perpetrator touched. The DNA obtained in that case led to a match with the DNA from the both the June 2006 case and the later, December 2015 case, thus launching the search for the alleged serial rapist.

McCall said after Lawsons arrest that police obtained DNA samples from as many as 30 community members voluntarily in their search for the perpetrator.

But when the Ohio State Highway Patrol arrested Lawson in November 2015 in Athens County for OVI (drunk-driving) and a felony charge of having a firearm in a vehicle while driving intoxicated, his DNA was not collected, Prosecutor Blackburn confirmed.

DNA collection for felony offenses occurs at the Southeastern Ohio Regional Jail in Nelsonville, Blackburn said, but in this case from what he understands Lawson was released into the custody of his then-wife without being taken to the jail, and thus his DNA was never collected.

Ohio Revised Code 2901.07 outlines state law with regard to DNA specimen collection procedure.

Subsection (B)(1)(a) states that after July 1, 2011, any person 18 years old or older arrested for a felony offense shall submit to a DNA specimen collection procedure administered by the head of the arresting law-enforcement agency. The head of the arresting law-enforcement agency shall cause the DNA specimen to be collected from the person during the intake process at the jail, community-based correctional facility, detention facility, or law enforcement agency office or station to which the arrested person is taken after the arrest.

The Athens NEWS sent the Ohio State Highway Patrol media contact an email on Friday morning asking why this had not occurred in Lawsons case but had not received a response as of our print deadline on Sunday.

Section (B)(1)(b) of ORC 2901.07 states that if the head of the arresting law-enforcement agency has not administered a DNA specimen collection procedure upon the person arrested for a felony in accordance with division (B)(1)(a) of this section by the time of the arraignment or first appearance of the person, the court shall order the person to appear before the sheriff or chief of police of the county or municipal corporation within 24 hours to submit to a DNA specimen collection procedure administered by the sheriff or chief of police.

Court records for Lawsons felony firearm case do not show the court ordering a DNA collection. This issue likely would not have been raised unless the court had been informed that DNA collection hadnt taken place due to Lawson not undergoing intake at the regional jail.

On Friday, Sheriff Smith said that his office has obtained hundreds of DNA testing kits from the Ohio State Bureau of Criminal Investigation and will now collect DNA specimens from those arraigned on felony charges in Athens County Common Pleas Court as a catch-all, even if they were arrested by some other law-enforcement agency.

He said that his office began doing so last week after having never done so in the past. The office is able to tell whether a person has had DNA collected previously by running his or her fingerprints through the Ohio Law Enforcement Gateway database, Smith said. If he or she has not, the Sheriffs Office will gather a sample, he said.

If its never been done, thats when we do the DNA test, he said. Its needed and its something thats very important and we want to make sure it gets done.

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Would DNA check after 2015 felony arrest have averted later assault? - Athens NEWS

BBC News

Paris police attack: Man charged over 'DNA link to gun' BBC News French police have charged a man with terrorism offences after his DNA was found on the gun used to shoot dead a police officer in Paris last month, judicial sources say. The 23-year-old, who was not named, was not previously known to investigators. and more »

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Paris police attack: Man charged over 'DNA link to gun' - BBC News

In this 2004 file photo a criminologist for the Arizona Department of Public Safety processes DNA samples at their lab in Phoenix. (Emmanuel Lozano/via AP, File)

PHOENIX (AP) The Arizona Department of Public Safety says a former supervisory forensic scientist failed to test DNA samples in dozens of cases and intentionally hid her caseload backlog.

An audit of the DNA units backlog disclosed the alleged misconduct by Kathy Press, who was demoted and resigned, KPNX-TV reported Thursday.

Press has acknowledged that she was behind but blames it on managers refusal to correct problems.

The lack of timely testing affected at least one criminal case, an alleged 2009 sexual assault in Tempe, in which a police request for further analysis wasnt handled for six years, the station reported.

Press backlog also included cases from Tempe, Glendale, Coolidge, Surprise, Yuma, Tucson and Prescott Valley. The cases included property crimes, sexual assaults and other violent crime.

Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery said the six-year delay in getting DNA results was among factors leading to no prosecution in the Tempe case.

Press denied allowing cases to sit idle to hide incompetence or misconduct. She said she couldnt keep up with a heavy caseload while taking on a leadership role and tried to re-assign cases so they could be completed.

She said the delay in the Tempe case was a true tragedy that was caused by the refusal of leadership within the Department of Public Safety to help fix a backlog they knew existed.

The lapse was discovered by a supervisor after the agency implemented a work-performance accounting and auditing system in 2015.

An internal investigation found that Press hid work files and took steps to conceal her incompetence, the agency said.

The employees lack of professionalism is beyond regrettable, it is reprehensible, the agency stated.

The agency said it has improved accounting processes and has reduced testing backlogs.

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DNA testing backlog figures in departure of state scientist - The Daily Courier