168. Smells Like A Complicated Partnership - DNA, Science And Justice

Ever since the mid-1980s, when Sir Alec Jeffreys first developed “genetic fingerprinting” which soon came to be known of DNA profiling, forensic science has not only become more important in crime-solving than in the previous several hundred years combined, its potential for making it almost impossible to commit a crime in the first place seems to grow exponentially with each passing day.  To be able to decode the secrets of DNA – which exists in the cells of virtually all living organisms and is for all practical purposes unique to each, and then break down that information into a practical form that can be used to definitively mark one individual over anyone else with certainties, the odds against which run into numbers that exceed the world population many times over, still seems like a miracle.  Even more miraculous has been the latest extrapolation of DNA profiling, forensic genealogy, which can take even trace samples of human DNA and, utilizing DNA data from public websites (most notably GEDMatch) designed to link branches of family trees for ancestry research, to find previously unidentified perpetrators and victims of crimes.  In this episode Melissa discusses the remarkable successes of forensic genealogy and struggles with the privacy issues companies like GEDMatch, Ancestry.com and 23andMe are facing – and the balance society is still trying to find between its desire to bring criminals to justice and simultaneously protect the rights of the individual.