From Suspects to the Spitterati: A collision of power, profit, and privacy
By Jessica Cussins
| 06. 27. 2013
DNA is the ultimate big-data dream. It can shed light on our health, ancestry, and family members. It can be used to solve crimes and exonerate the innocent, investigate diseases and treatments, advance basic scientific knowledge, and reveal certain aspects of our histories and potential futures.
But as genetic data is collected and used in increasingly varied contexts, issues of privacy, rights, access, justice, and innovation are poised to collide – and to intersect our lives in both positive and negative ways. The questions raised by this coming collision won’t be answered immediately, but we need to start now to tease out their complexities.
Many suitors are lining up to exploit the explosion of genetic information.
- Local police agencies are creating their own databases – some call them “rogue” databases – and the Supreme Court recently determined that state and federal authorities can take DNA from people arrested (pre-conviction) for serious crimes.
- Companies are rushing to patent genetic findings, even when such claims are absurd (and now, at least partially, ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court).
- Marketing and advertising gurus...
Related Articles
By Annalee Armstrong, BioSpace | 09.11.2024
Complex gene therapies are starting to hit the market but all have faced the same reality: a tepid reception from the healthcare system and a cloudy path to profitability.
It can take about a year for a patient to go...
By Julia Brown, The Conversation | 08.16.2024
With their primary goal to advance scientific knowledge, most scientists are not trained or incentivized to think through the societal implications of the technologies they are developing. Even in genomic medicine, which is geared toward benefiting future patients, time and...
By Smriti Mallapaty, Nature | 09.11.2024
Under his microscope, Jun Wu could see several tiny spheres, each less than 1 millimetre wide. They looked just like human embryos: a dark cluster of cells surrounded by a cavity, and then another ring of cells.
But Wu, a...
By Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology Review | 08.22.2024
In 2016, I attended a large meeting of journalists in Washington, DC. The keynote speaker was Jennifer Doudna, who just a few years before had co-invented CRISPR, a revolutionary method of changing genes that was sweeping across biology labs because...