Category Archives: Transhuman News

25 January 2013 Last updated at 09:21 ET

Will the Government's Protection of Freedoms Act lead to an increase in murders, rapes and other serious crimes? New research from the United States suggests it might.

The legislation, which became law last May, is resulting in many thousands of DNA profiles being removed from the UK's giant DNA database - people arrested but not convicted of a serious offence after three years. Ministers argue that the previous approach, in which DNA samples were kept indefinitely, undermined the freedom of innocent citizens.

Britain pioneered the use of DNA as a crime-fighting tool, introducing the world's first national database in 1985. Today it holds the profiles of more than five million people and is credited with helping solve some 40,000 crimes a year.

The US, Canada, Australia and most European countries have followed the UK's lead, with DNA profiling internationally regarded as the most important breakthrough in modern policing. Until now, though, there has been little scientific research on whether such databases really do reduce offending.

Last month Jennifer Doleac, assistant professor of public policy and economics at the University of Virginia, published a paper entitled The Effects of DNA Databases on Crime, which suggested that size matters: "larger DNA databases reduce crime rates".

The paper estimates that each new profile added to the US DNA database - the Combined DNA Index System, or Codis - resulted in 0.57 fewer serious offences. Uploading a profile costs about $40, which means that in 2010 the database cost the American taxpayer $30.5m but, according to the research paper, saved a whopping $21bn in crime prevention.

Retaining DNA from individuals who are not convicted of an offence is as controversial in the US as it is in the UK. Some American states do keep samples from people arrested but not convicted while others do not. So the University of Virginia study was able to compare the two approaches.

Ms Doleac calculates that if every state kept the profiles of people arrested but not convicted, the US would see a fall of 3.2% in murders, 6.6% in rapes and 5.4% in vehicle thefts.

This conclusion flies in the face of current British government policy that does the opposite. In a Commons debate in October 2011, Home Office Minister James Brokenshire challenged the suggestion "that the more people's DNA is on the database, the more effective it is".

Link:
DNA and individual freedom v crime prevention

Scientists have stored some Shakespearean sonnets and part of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech by encoding them in DNA -- a process that could preserve those famous words for millennia. The team at the European Bioinformatics Institute isn't the first to try this new approach to data storage. A Harvard team stored around 700 terabytes of digital data in a single gram of DNA last year.

Researchers at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) on Wednesday announced their success at storing data by encoding it to DNA. The system could stand the test of time -- tens of thousands of years, perhaps.

This method for archiving data could make it possible to store 100 million hours of high-definition video in about a cup of DNA, according to the scientists, and given the trend toward Big Data, that could be a big breakthrough. One gram of DNA could hold as much as information as more than a million CDs.

Nick Goldman of EMBL-EBI looking at synthesised DNA. (Credit: EMBL Photolab)

Unlike existing methods of data storage -- all of which have relatively limited life spans -- DNA has proven it can endure, literally, for ages. Like any physical carbon-based object, DNA can be destroyed, but it happens to be far more sturdy than paper or tape, and it can't easily be damaged by electromagnetic fields.

"We already know that DNA is a robust way to store information, because we can extract it from wooly mammoth bones -- which date back tens of thousands of years -- and make sense of it," said Nick Goldman of EMBL-EBI. "It's also incredibly small, dense, and does not need any power for storage, so shipping and keeping it is easy."

DNA could have an advantage over many current methods of storage.

Although tape is the cheapest storage medium, it's performance is lacking, explained Fang Zhang, storage analyst at IHS iSuppli. Analyzing Big Data using tape would take much longer, compared to SSD and HDD. Depending on how frequently it's used, tape could wear out.

+ While it's highly unlikely that the words of William Shakespeare would ever be lost, 154 of the Bard's sonnets have been spelled out using DNA. An audio file containing part of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech has also been encoded.

Being stored in DNA could allow those famous words to live on for eons.

Excerpt from:
DNA Could Become the Next Big Data Warehouse