Police often can take children's DNA without telling parents (infants, support, clever)
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I'm surprised at that. In Texas, DNA is now taken from convicted felons, but I've never heard of anyone having their DNA taken at a routine traffic stop or when cops come to check out some disturbance.
As much as I support the effort to stop random DNA tests, it's not like your DNA is "private". A human body litters skin cells and hair throughout the day.
A *really* clever and infinitely funded police department could detain an individual in a sterile room for 24 hours and have about 100 hairs and lots of skin cells.
As much as I support the effort to stop random DNA tests, it's not like your DNA is "private". A human body litters skin cells and hair throughout the day.
A *really* clever and infinitely funded police department could detain an individual in a sterile room for 24 hours and have about 100 hairs and lots of skin cells.
I agree about DNA not being private.
However, DNA is only found in the hair follicle, not the shaft. So when you go get your hair cut, there is no DNA in the hair trimmings - it's already dead. The root of the hair needs to be pulled out to access the live DNA. Same goes for dead skin cells that you shed off.
Anyone who's ever had blood drawn (which is pretty much everyone in the country, including newborns) loses the right to that tissue once it leaves their body.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by English Ivy
I agree about DNA not being private.
However, DNA is only found in the hair follicle, not the shaft. So when you go get your hair cut, there is no DNA in the hair trimmings - it's already dead. The root of the hair needs to be pulled out to access the live DNA. Same goes for dead skin cells that you shed off.
Anyone who's ever had blood drawn (which is pretty much everyone in the country, including newborns) loses the right to that tissue once it leaves their body.
That's not true. That's what HIPAA laws are about.
My understanding is that HIPAA protects the sharing of your medical record - not your tissues. Here is more info (very detailed!) from the US Dept of Health and Human Services: https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-profes...ons/index.html
Now, regarding tissue privacy and your rights to your tissues – like cheek swabs from a police stop:
Someone please correct me if this information is outdated; this is from the Afterword of the nonfiction book, "The Immortal Life of Henritetta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot:
Today most Americans have their tissue on file somewhere. When you go to the doctor for a routine blood test or to have a mole removed, when you have an appendectomy, tonsillectomy, or any other kind of ectomy, the stuff you leave behind doesn't always get thrown out. Doctors, hospitals, and laboratories keep it. Often indefinitely.
In 1999 the RAND Corporation published a report (the first and, so far, last of its kind) with a "conservative estimate" that more than 307 million tissue samples from more than 178 million people were stored in the United States alone. This number, the report said, was increasing by more than 20 million samples each year. The samples come from routine medical procedures, tests, operations, clinical trials, and research donations. They sit in lab freezers, on shelves, or in industrial vats of liquid nitrogen. They are stored at military facilities, the FBI, and the National Institutes of Health. They're in biotech company labs and most hospitals. Biobanks store appendixes, ovaries, skin, sphincters, testicles, fat, even foreskins from most circumcisions. They also house blood samples taken from most infants born in the United States since the late sixties, when states started mandating the screening of all newborns for genetic diseases.
And the scale of tissue research is only getting bigger. "It used to be, some researcher in Florida had sixty samples in his freezer, then another guy in Utah had some in his," says Kathy Hudson, a molecular biologist who founded the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University and is now chief of staff at NIH. "Now we're talking about a massive, massive scale." In 2009 the NIH invested $13.5 million to develop a bank for the samples taken from newborns nationwide. A few years ago the National Cancer Institute started gathering what it expects will be millions of tissue samples for mapping cancer genes; the Genographic Project began doing the same to map human migration patterns, as did the NIH to track disease genes. And for several years the public has been sending samples by the millions to personalized DNA testing companies like 23andMe, which only provide customers with their personal or medical or genealogical information if they first sign a form granting permission for their samples to be stored for future research.
Scientists use these samples to develop everything from flu vaccines to penis-enlargement products. They put cells in culture dishes and expose them to radiation, drugs, cosmetics, viruses, household chemicals, and biological weapons, and then study their responses. Without those tissues, we would have no tests for diseases like hepatitis and HIV; no vaccines for rabies, smallpox, measles; none of the promising new drugs for leukemia, breast cancer, colon cancer. And developers of the products that rely on human biological materials would be out billions of dollars.
How you should feel about all this isn’t obvious. It’s not as if scientists are stealing your arm or some vital organ. They’re using tissue scraps you parted with voluntarily. Still, that often involves someone taking part of you. And people often have a strong sense of ownership when it comes to their bodies. Even tiny scraps of them. Especially when they hear that someone else might be making money off those scraps, or using them to uncover potentially damaging information about their genes and medical histories. But a feeling of ownership doesn’t hold up in court. And at this point no case law has fully clarified whether you own or have the right to control your tissues. When they’re part of your body, they’re clearly yours. Once they’re excised, your rights get murky.
Maybe the laws have changed since the book was published in 2009. If so, I'd be interested to learn about it.
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