UC Berkeley Asking Incoming Students For DNA 468
peterofoz writes "The students will be asked to voluntarily submit a DNA sample. The cotton swabs will come with two bar code labels. One label will be put on the DNA sample and the other is kept for the students' own records. The confidential process is being overseen by Jasper Rine, a campus professor of Genetics and Development Biology, who says the test results will help students make decisions about their diet and lifestyle." No word in the story on just what "confidential" means — who will have access to the results, how long they'll be kept, or what else they might someday be used for. Will the notoriously liberal Berkeley campus see this as a service or an invasion of privacy?
Gattaca? (Score:3, Interesting)
There's no gene for fate.
I'm torn (Score:5, Interesting)
It's voluntary, so there is no invasion of privacy going on, when you give up your DNA willingly you can't be expected it to be held very strongly in confidentiality. It's kind of like that whole unsecured Wifi debacle. If you don't know exactly what they want to do with your DNA, you'd be a fool to give it to them. That is their mistake to make though, I'm not going to deny them that by saying this kind of action should be illegal.
If kids want dietting tips, or help on decisions, there are plenty of resources out there. I'm a little more paranoid at the idea of this becoming Comfortable. First its "Let us take your DNA to help you diet". Even if only 10% of people sign up, if they enjoy their results they'll tell their friends to partake in it next year. It will grow, until more schools are doing it. Then the elementary schools will do it. Then that confidentiality agreement will phase away, and there goes the neighbourhood.
I guess the only course of action is to warn people of the dangers and hope they make the right choice.
Absolutely UNREAL that the Berkeley IRB approved. (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe they just don't give a damn about potential research subjects' rights during recruitment, but permitting the solicitation to go out AS PART OF A FUCKING FRESHMAN ORIENTATION PACKET is beyond the pale. This research subject recruitment strategy is damnably coercive my view. Berkeley's IRB should be ashamed. Or better yet, replaced.
Re:Absolutely UNREAL that the Berkeley IRB approve (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Both, of course (Score:3, Interesting)
>>>Upholding the status quo means thinking the same thing: everything is peachy just the way it is and the old ways are best.
I'm a conservative, and I think things are FAR from peachy in the U.S. We've basically just traded one set of oligarchs (King George and his nobles) for another set of oligarchs (King Bush, King Obama, the Congress, and the Justices). :-|
A new and truly liberal idea is to let each Individual be sovereign & run his/her own affairs with virtually no government interference. ;-) But alas that idea will never fly in someplace like Berkeley. :-(
Re:Privacy (Score:3, Interesting)
This is only a problem while "one side" has a monopoly on the use of these technologies. If invasive technology is ubiquitous and uncontrollable, then any abuse of that technology should be totally transparent to everybody.
In short, the answer to "who will watch the watchers" needs to be "everyone ... and records should be kept forever."
Re:Both, of course (Score:3, Interesting)
The GP made the mistake of not clarifying "Liberal". It seems he meant what in the US would be called "Libertarian" (with a small or a big L dependent on whom you ask) - which in large parts of the world is the same thing as meant with "liberal".
In the US you've managed to make "liberal" mean "socialist" (or at least what you believe to be socialist, which would still be far far right wing in other countries).
(libertarians can be both right and left-leaning, although some would claim that libertarians cannot support a non-free market and thus they're usually grouped at the right end of the scale. The Political Compass makes a better argument adding a freedom-dimension to politics)
Two words... (Score:3, Interesting)
BITE ME!
That is the only way they would get a DNA sample from me. And they better hold me down, or, I will use that technique to get a sample of their DNA.
Damn, how stupid have people become?
Re:Both, of course (Score:3, Interesting)
Collecting people's DNA and using it to screen things isn't a NEW idea at all. Merely the screening process has evolved. Eugenics is quite old.
Re:Privacy (Score:3, Interesting)
You think you've got all the source.
Remember the story of the hacked compiler which would compile login with a backdoor and create a new hacked compiler if it was compiling unhacked sources?
You can never be sure. Unless you read machine code and build everything yourself, but there is the BIOS, CPU microcode, etc.
You can NEVER be sure.
UC Berkeley's Not Liberal (Score:4, Interesting)
UC Berkeley's campus isn't liberal. It's got the most stereotypical frat/sorority ghetto I've ever seen. Its budget is stuffed with defense contractor and other giant corporation contracts, especially oil and telecom corps. Its law school hired John Yoo, the Bush lawyer who wrote the US torture regime rationalizations.
The list goes on. But these "Conservative" (corporatist, or worse) activities are defined by being exclusive, even covert, even secret. While Berkeley's actually "liberal" (or whatever's not "Conservative") activities are usually defined by being public, even extroverted. Then take the mass media's interest in hiding the "Conservative" activities behind a distracting "liberal" show, and you get Berkeley a reputation for being "liberal".
Re:Welcome (Score:3, Interesting)
Voluntary often turns into compulsory eventually. Why would they possibly need anyone's DNA? And if some woman is attacked on campus are they then going to turn samples over to law enforcement or other agency to test for a possible match?
In Texas, parents recently found out that since 2002, blood drawn from their infants [statesman.com] for routine screening, was being kept and sometimes sold. There was an "opt-out" program, which of course most parents didn't know about. Who wants your kid's DNA floating around?
Re:Privacy (Score:3, Interesting)
There's a way...but it involves cross-compilation. If you're really paranoid, cross-compilation and an intermediate language designed de novo. Then you write interpreter for the new language, and in that new language you write the compiler for a subset of the target language to emit assember code for a different platform . Taking this emitted code, you assemble it. (Static assembly, no system libraries. If you're really paranoid, design it to run on bare metal with no OS or memory management.) Now you've got a secure compiler, but it's probably not very efficient, so you compile a more complete version of the language, with more features. Continue.
I don't think this was what Wirth was aiming for, but Oberon would be a good candidate target language, because you'd NEVER need to trust system libraries or memory management. You could always run from bare metal.
Notice that a part of the process was designing a custom language? That was so no prediction of what code would represent the language could be made ahead of time. Similarly the cross-compilation was so the hardware couldn't predict what bit patterns meant what.
Of course, this is only ALMOST safe. Real safety requires that you also build the CPU. (I once made a really simple one, so it's not totally impossible. just expensive and inefficient and limited and time-consuming.)