Mute Witness: Forensic Sketches From Nothing But DNA 68
First time accepted submitter Todd Palin (1402501) writes "Researchers at Penn State university are trying to reconstruct images of faces based only on a DNA sample of the individual. As far out as this sounds, they did a pretty good job at matching the actual appearance of the faces. This is a pretty good start on a whole new use for DNA samples. Imagine a mug shot of a rapist based only on a DNA sample."
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You can look the same, but your fingerprints and DNA won't match up. Before we get to the boring stuff like where he was, what was he doing, his connection to x*y/z, possible motives etc etc. I assume you can tell twins apart with science/magic.
It's a helpful stepping stone in a criminal case, not the final nail. And I have a hard time believing any reasonable court of law would render judgement based on a DNA sketch without other concrete evidence.
Re:If its true then DNA is useless in foresnsics (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that this kind of thing makes the police go on fishing trips. Round up everyone who looks a bit like the sketch and ask them for a DNA sample. If they refuse they become a suspect.
The police in the UK have done it that way many times. Ask everyone in the area of a crime to submit DNA samples, often hundreds of thousands. People who refuse to "rule themselves out" by providing a sample are brought in for questioning and investigated, because privacy is no defence in their eyes.
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I don't see what's wrong with that. If they were convicting people based on that, that'd be a different thing.
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So if you value your privacy and don't want your DNA on the police national database you should accept them coming into your home, taking away all your computers and mobile phones, questioning you for days and then having to explain all that to your wife and employer? Okay.
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Using that to generate a list of suspects which the police can narrow down based on additional evidence is fine. If that's the sole evidence for a trial, then there is a problem.
Well at that point I guess they'd get a torture warrant.
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And I have a hard time believing any reasonable court of law would render judgement based on a DNA sketch without other concrete evidence.
Why? Are you ignorant of history? There is a long list of people who have been wrongfully convicted because jurors were won over on fancy sounding but faulty DNA evidence.
http://www.innocenceproject.or... [innocenceproject.org]
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There is a long list of people who have been wrongfully convicted because jurors were won over on fancy sounding but faulty DNA evidence.
http://www.innocenceproject.or... [innocenceproject.org]
Your reference is the exact opposite of what you claim. It is not about people wrongly convicted by DNA evidence. It is about people wrongly convicted with other evendice, that were supsequently exonerated with DNA evidence.
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well, in their defense, this is slashdot.
Re: If its true then DNA is useless in foresnsics (Score:1)
Is this a joke? (Score:5, Informative)
Right now DNA often comes in near the end of an investigation; you have to select people to test based on traditional detective work, and then you must legally acquire their DNA to match with your sample. If suspects don't want to give you DNA simply because you asked nicely, you have to be fairly sure of their guilt - and able to convince a judge of why you're sure - before you can get their DNA involuntarily. If this test became effective, the sample you got at the beginning would show you who among the likely suspects to test against, and probably lower the bar for getting legal clearance to take their DNA.
Not to mention you clearly have no clue how DNA testing really works; if it's important you can and will be able to match a decent sample to one and only one person. There are commonplace genetic tests that can produce 1 in 10 trillion profiles of a person's or sample's DNA to match against. The fact that this DNA processing produced a rough sketch matching X number of people is irrelevant when you'll be able to narrow that group to very few or one with the most basic detective work.
Re: Is this a joke? (Score:3)
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I don't know, I'd say the cheekbones and chin were very close and the mouth pretty close. The rest of the face (forehead, etc) is blocked in the actual photo so I can't really comment on that part, but someone who knew the person may recognize that part. All in all, I'd say it would probably be asier for an aquantance to recognize that rendering than the grainy security camera footage the police are currently forced to rely on.
This technique isn't aimed at getting convictions, but finding suspects (the old
DNA comes in the first phase already (Score:3)
Right now, DNA comes in the first phase of the investigation in a lot of cases, especially in countries where the police can get DNA samples of large groups of people without a lot of paperwork and judges involved. Even if they need a judge for individual samples, they still use the characteristics to determine what ethnicity, eye colour and such the person that left their DNA at the crime scene has.
DNA almost always can't prove someone actually committed the crime, only that they were there at some point
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Right now DNA often comes in near the end of an investigation; you have to select people to test based on traditional detective work, and then you must legally acquire their DNA to match with your sample. If suspects don't want to give you DNA simply because you asked nicely, you have to be fairly sure of their guilt - and able to convince a judge of why you're sure - before you can get their DNA involuntarily.
So police work is hard. Boo fucking hoo. When someone's freedom (or life) hangs in the balance, it ought to be hard.
Gattaca (Score:3)
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Maybe that's because it wasn't, and is actually just the latest development in the continuing advancement of the study of genetics, and would have happened regardless of the existence of a 17-year-old science fiction film.
And last time I checked, New Scientist hadn't yet had to stoop to opening most articles with "It sounds like something out of [insert vaguely relevant pop culture reference here], but scientists now say..."
And now everyone has your DNA. . . (Score:3)
I wonder how many unique individual DNA can be extracted on average by taking a sample of rain run-off from a busy city street? Let me coin the process here as "Gutter Diving."
Re:And now ANYONE has your DNA. . . (Score:3)
Yes, took a while to find, but I couldn't have asked for better. You look about my body build and proportion. Same skin, eye and hair color. Seen in the dark or in passing in a hoodie, I doubt someone wouldn't be equally likely to pick either of us from a lineup. Ah, that was a fine cup of coffee, wasn't it. Well, in addition to dropping mine in that refuse bin too, I'm snatching yours out; Saliva, [x] Check. Oh, silly me, I just meant to drop in this napkin, not my keys and cup. How embarrassing! See
The 100 (Score:1)
DNA anaylsis is fairly conclusive, so why... (Score:1)
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If you take a police DNA one out of a million person will match it exactly, in the USA that means 300 people will match any sample in the police data base.
Sure. But if a woman in New York is murdered, and one of the 300 matches is a auto mechanic in Seattle, who was working at the time, then he can probably be crossed off the list. But if one of the 300 matches is her abusive alcoholic ex-husband, then the police might want to follow up on that.
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A person's face ->which pretty much everybody can understand
A dna print ->which nobody can understand.
Seriously slashdot?
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If you have the DNA sample, that is far more definitive than the approximated face.
But what if you don't have the DNA sample from a suspect? Or even any suspects?
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*facepalm*
I meant a situation where you have DNA from the crime scene, but don't have and/or can't get DNA from a suspect.
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yeah, welll... (Score:2)
Plastic surgery FTW, eh?
Ok, in seriousness, I could see this as a great tool for anthropologists, but so far as crime-solving goes, it's just about guaranteed to have a false- positive rate about 100x the true positive rate. OTOH, that works for the TSA...
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but so far as crime-solving goes
It's not for crime-solving. It's for crime-investigating.
it's just about guaranteed to have a false- positive rate about 100x the true positive rate
Based on the numbers pulled out of whose behind?
If you've got a shortlist of 10, or even 100, suspects and no other evidence - yet - don't you think even a rough idea of what that person probably looks like might be helpful?
Didn't you play Guess Who? [wikipedia.org] as a child?
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If you've got a shortlist of 10 people, plus DNA evidence, you don't need to guess what he looks like.
You probably don't need to guess what he looks like if you have 100 people and DNA.
On the other hand, if you have a shortlist of 10 or 100 people and NO other evidence, you have no DNA to fake up a picture.
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If you've got a shortlist of 10 people, plus DNA evidence, you don't need to guess what he looks like.
You do if you have no DNA for comparison. Maybe none of the suspects won't give a sample. Maybe you can't get a court order forcing them to provide. Maybe you don't even know who the suspects are - maybe all you have is evidence of their presence near the scene (CCTV, for example). With a rough idea of what the culprit looks like, you can concentrate any subsequent CCTV trawl on the most likelies.
On the other hand, if you have a shortlist of 10 or 100 people and NO other evidence, you have no DNA to fake up a picture.
Err, yes. Obviously. So?
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it's just about guaranteed to have a false- positive rate about 100x the true positive rate. OTOH, that works for the TSA...
Just wanted to let you know that there is a term for that: positive predictive value [wikipedia.org]. In the TSA's case, the PPV would be effectively 0.
Thought I would share in the hope that others will return the favor for me in the future.
Interesting, need more sample photos (Score:2)
Your face may have been sculpted by junk DNA (Score:3)
Interview with Kayser ("we've only found the first five genes"): http://www.scientificamerican.... [scientificamerican.com]
In short: Hair and eye colour prediction: 0.9, height: 0.75, everything else "much lower" than 0.75 with 0.5 being totally random.
And from the article itself: "The next step is to run larger studies in different populations to confirm that the variants found so far are statistically reliable." which explains why there aren't any more test examples.
A bit about how it works ("Fine Tuning of Craniofacial Morphology by Distant-Acting Enhancers"): http://www.evolutionnews.org/2... [evolutionnews.org]
Disappointing (Score:2)
It's a nice story, and they provide a MatLab environment to play around with their model, but ultimately I don't believe this work is reproducible given the materials provided. All we're really given is a sandbox to play in where we can adjust model parameters, and so the work should never have been published.
What would convince me? For starters, the ability to take an arbitrary set of values for these SNPs, punch them in, and see the result change. If I put in SNPs from one of the CEU HapMap samples, I wou
Probable cause? (Score:1)
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Re: Probable cause? (Score:1)
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Imagine ... (Score:2)
Jon Bennet Ramsey (Score:2)
Think of how fast it would be to match up.
Interestingly, would courts require you submit a cell in future, if your pix appears to match one?
Also, I wonder if this can be used to capture others that are sitting in jail, but did the crime and simply did not admit to it.
What irony. (Score:1)
"Researchers at Penn State ... Imagine a mug shot of a rapist based only on a DNA sample."
Such a case seems ironic given that this is the same university that was (recently) involved in a scandal related to such crime.