[Closed] National DNA Database, Why Not?

I think you will find that both those samples remain on file.

From memory we were given leaflets etc at the time that assured us they were only used for elimination purposes and that they would not and could not be legally held indefinitely on file.

Of course that was around 1995, so the law may well have changed since then.

G -
"...and I hope you never end up as a member of an unpopular minority group."
I am, white middle class, middle aged male, still happily married after 29 years with the same woman, two kids both of which are hers and mine.... apparently

Congratulations. So were a few million Jews in Germany. It would be much easier for the state if there was a DNA database to abuse.

Oh that's right. Invoke Godwin's Law just as the discussion was getting interesting.

Err - talking about state persecution of unpopular minorities isn't exactly irrelevant in a discussion of the state gathering biometric data that could be used for persecution of unpopular minorities. It's not like, for instance, s/he said Australia's helmet laws were "worthy of the Nazis and one step away from Nuremburg laws" or something completely hyperbolic like that. So you can ram Godwin up your poop chute! 🙂

Thanks Konabunny, nicely put.

I recently read the journal of a German citizen of the time. He was a Protestant who had served in the front line in WW1. However the state deemed him to be Jewish because of ancestry, and what struck me was the way he rationalised away each restriction as they crept in, one by one, until he realised he was trapped. He escaped by the skin of his teeth. Millions were not so lucky. Yet Germany was a civilised western country - looking at it before the Nazis, you would never have predicted it.

Probably many people don't know or care that genocide has been attempted in these isles in the past, fortunately not in the last hundred years or so, but they regarded themselves as civilised, rational, and decent then too.

Alright, fair enough but I still think it reeks of hyperbole and [i]reductio ad Hitlerum[/i].

We're not talking about a database used to persecute minorities. We're talking about a DNA [u]matching[/u] database.

Such a database would be never store the entire DNA sequence of every person. Bear in mind that [url= http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/project/info.shtml ]the human genome consists of around [b]3 billion base pairs[/b].[/url] We simply don't have the technology to store 3 billion things about every person in the UK and then run matches on it.

Instead the database stores statistical information about the DNA, such as the number of repeating pairs at specific loci.

The FBI's CODIS database uses samples that have undergone STR analysis examining 13 loci. The odds of two people having identical 13-loci STR profiles are about one in a billion.

This isn't something that can be used to identify everyone that has blonde hair and blue eyes.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/genetic-science/dna-evidence1.htm

Such a database would be never store the entire DNA sequence of every person.

Says who?

Erm.. I do. I understand your concern about the escalation of these things.
But all ethics and legality aside, that would be a HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGE frickin database.

Population of the UK (as of July 2008): 60,943,912
DNA sequence per person: 3,000,000,000 base pairs.

Even if you could store each base pair as a single bit (0=AT, 1=CG), then you'd still be talking about 21 MILLION GB just to store the DNA data.

If you're not familiar with IT terminology then that's a f*ckload. In fact its quite a few f*ckloads. For comparison, most PCs these days have a 250GB hard drive, so you'd need 85,137 of them.

And if you wanted to be able to index that DNA data so you could actually search it then you'd need at least the same again. Even then it would be completely unusable because the searches would take decades to run.

The [url= http://www.nersc.gov/ ]National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center has one of the biggest databases in the world[/url] which is 2.8 petabytes. So you're talking about say 20 of them!

GrahamS:

This is easily sorted. Take so many base pairs and produce an index from them. This then points to a separate database on a separate system for that subset. This way you introduce parallelism into the architecture. Do through a number of iterations and you have a searchable DNA database - it doesn't have to be a linear search.

But yes, the quantities of storage required would be very large indeed. But it is about (your calculations) 21EiB. We have terabyte drives now; just a matter of time, I s'pose.

Getting a bit OT, but yes you could go massively parallel. Maybe distribute it over say 400,000 PCs. Your running costs would be horrific though and I don't know what you'd do about backups!

The point is, there is an enormous difference between a DNA-matching database which stores statistical DNA-profiles (like the ones that are in use today and the kind we were originally discussing) and "the state" building some kind of fantasy Über-database, 20 times larger than the biggest in the world, at a cost of billions of pounds, that goes far, far beyond the actual law-enforcement requirements, purely on the off-chance that some tyrannical regime in a dystopian future may require them to identify all citizens that are genetically predisposed to colour blindness and a fondness for cats.

In my experience, government IT projects are rarely that well future proofed!

GrahamS -
...purely on the off-chance that some tyrannical regime in a dystopian future may require them to identify all citizens that are genetically predisposed to colour blindness and a fondness for cats.

In my experience, government IT projects are rarely that well future proofed!

Get a dystopian future government, and they'll find the money, just like money was found for concentration camps...

Get a dystopian future government, and they'll find the money, just like money was found for concentration camps...

Well I'm sure they might, but hopefully you can now see that this isn't a coherent argument against establishing a National DNA Database and why talk of such a database being used for eugenics is essentially just scaremongering.