Building the Face of a Criminal From DNA 59
Dave Knott writes: It sounds like science fiction, but revealing the face of a criminal based on their genes may be closer than we think. In a process known as molecular photo fitting, scientists are experimenting with using genetic markers from DNA to build up a picture of an offender's face. Dr. Peter Claes, a medical imaging specialist at the University of Leuven, has amassed a database of faces and corresponding DNA. Armed with this information, he is able to model how a face is constructed based on just 20 genes (this number will soon be expanded to 200). At the moment, police couldn't publish a molecular photo-fit like this and hope to catch a killer. But that's not how Dr. Claes sees the technique being used in a criminal investigation. "If I were to bring this result to an investigator, I wouldn't necessarily give him the image to broadcast. I would talk to him and say okay, you're looking for a woman, with a very specific chin and eyebrow structure."
Roko's Basilisk (Score:5, Funny)
If you're a bad person we'll reconstruct an identical clone of you and imprison it as your punishment.
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If you're a bad person we'll reconstruct an identical clone of you and imprison it as your punishment.
And any clones of me would not have my memories as those aren't genetic, so why are you going to torcher an inoccent person?
Also not at all on topic.
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More like: If you commit a crime, we'll imprison you and let your clone take over your life. If your clone commits crime, a clone of your clone will take over your life while your clone is imprisoned. And so on.
Cue criminal being released from prison after his sentence is finished and finding that everyone likes Clone better than Original. Original kills Clone, is convicted of murder, put in prison, and Clone 2 is created to take over Original's life. (Someone needs to write this sci-fi story now!)
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Ah the sequel to Dick's classic book:
"You can suffer it for you (and that's that)"
Phillip K Dick unpublished work
0.5% people are clones identical twins (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:4)
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While it's a mainstay of many movies from the 1960s and 1970s for criminals to disguise themselves using highly expensive plastic surgery, I'd hardly call it "common", no.
Just grow a beard to hide that distinctively shaped chin, or pluck your eyebrows.
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SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid (Score:2)
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rendering completely inaccurate... can be close, but not perfect... *sigh*
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It doesn't have to be perfect. The more people they have, the more perfect match they will get. They can also mix techniques: take fingerprints with, say, 80% acccuracy and then pick their faces based on those renderings. But the real power here is that those who think are not guilty will have their 1:1 DNA matching taken. The face matching is just a tool for investigating those who don't want to have their DNA matched.
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I'm not a biologist, but I'm going to go with "never". From what I understand, we can predict a persons height with far greater accuracy by simply measuring the height of their parents than we can with DNA. I have serious doubts about our ability to predict, accurately, anything more complicated.
We've got at least one regular biologist around here. I'd like to hear their opinion.
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Very short people who grew up poor can have children that tower over them by their 12th birthday if the kids grow up in a better environment.
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That makes you wonder how much about a person's appearance is genetically determined -- and if the science fiction in the summary is possible at all.
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At which point you can upload a copy of your thoughts and live forever. Maybe this is how we find immortality.
Expert in one thing.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I like how he talks about how he would envision seeing this used, but, I think he actually has it backwards. Not surprizing since, his expertise is in the technique, not necessarily in what it may be used for.
Rather than "you are looking for...." better is to hold this back and narrow down the field. "You have X suspects, now you can eliminate all that don't match this". That will give you better results than "look for people who match this".
This sort of thing has come up many times with the use of this sort of statistic. There are only a handful of blood types, for example, but, if you can say with certainty that the suspect is one of a small group of 2 or 3 people, then blood type might get you down to 1....even though it would be otherwise pretty useless without other information to go on.
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If you have their DNA, why bother with modeling their appearance? Just do DNA tests on the small group of suspects.
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You are assuming that they have suspects. There are lots of cases where all they have is just the sample of DNA and no suspects at all. If someone is assaulted and manages to scratch the other person there is DNA evidence but not necessarily a known suspect. Same goes for sexual assault though a different type of DNA. And it seems like they can get DNA off of lots of different things now (pizza?) so they can collect it in cases where they don't have suspects. Plus there's DNA evidence from plenty of co
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Who says you have all their DNA? Just because you have suspects doesn't mean you have enough evidence to mandate they cooperate. You also might be too moral (yes, I consider it quite wrong) to go about using loopholes to surreptitiously collect their DNA, or just lack the resources to pull it off.
Or perhaps, this will rule out many (or all) of your suspects before you subject them to sampling, possibly against their will.
Or more likely this will be used to generate grant money and will never be used in any
Re:Expert in one thing.... (Score:4, Insightful)
How this will actually be used:
WELCOME TO DESIGNER BABIES INC.
PLEASE INSERT EMBRYONIC DNA SWAB.
GENERATING IMAGE...
[ image ]
PREDICTED RELATIVE BEAUTY RANKING AGE 20: 63%
ABORT / RETRY / IGNORE
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Good, hopefully people will have less children overall. They should come up with lots of reasons for people not to have children.
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Maybe his real 'expertise' is in sales, or public relations.
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Obligatory... (Score:4, Funny)
Brave new world. . . (Score:2)
Of course, this will also increase the public scrutiny of public officials and other powerful individuals, which I can only see as a good thing (as any "House of Cards" fan should be able to agree with. .
Details, details. (Score:2)
Scientist to policeman: My findings in the DNA show the same thing that the witness told us: It was Big Nose Kate.
This is just stupid (Score:2)
Old news? (Score:4, Informative)
Even artists know about it.
2012
https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]
"Researchers have moved one step closer to facial reconstruction with DNA by discovering the genes that help control the width of the human face. A recent study of almost 10,000 individuals revealed five genes associated with different facial shapes – known as PRDM16, PAX3, TP63, C5orf50, and COL17A1. Manfred Kayser and his team of the Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, used Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) of people’s heads to map facial landmarks and estimate facial distances."
2013
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/09... [cnn.com] "We leave genetic traces of ourselves wherever we go -- in a strand of hair left on the subway or in saliva on the side of a glass at a cafe. So you may want to think twice the next time you spit out your gum or drop a cigarette butt in public. New York artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg might pick it up, extract the DNA and create a 3-D face that could look like you. Her project, "Stranger Visions," fashions portrait sculptures from bits of genetic material collected in public places."
2014
http://www.forbes.com/sites/al... [forbes.com]
"Sometime in the future, technicians will go over the scene of the crime. They’ll uncover some DNA evidence and take it to the lab. And when the cops need to get a picture of the suspect, they won’t have to ask eyewitnesses to give descriptions to a sketch artist – they’ll just ask the technicians to get a mugshot from the DNA. That, at least, is the potential of new research being published today in PLOS Genetics. In that paper, a team of scientists describe how they were able to produce crude 3D models of faces extrapolated from a person’s DNA."
http://www.kuleuven.be/english... [kuleuven.be]
"Scientists are getting closer to constructing a likeness of a person's face using nothing but a DNA sample. Postdoctoral researcher Peter Claes and his colleagues describe the technique in a recent publication in PLOS Genetics. Their work opens a horizon of potential future applications in forensics, anthropology and medicine."
Now its 2015.
First look at unborn baby's adult face (Score:5, Interesting)
Criminal investigations is a niche use. The broad use and real revenue would be an adult picture of your unborn child or new baby. Future parents already pay $300-400 for 3d sonograms of their fetus. Imagine seeing your new baby's face each year from two to twenty years old.
You could even sequence a couple individually and show the full range of boy and girl facial outcomes with probabilities. Right now they can use some morphing techniques as a kludge but genetics could be MUCH more predictive.
Creepy, creepy, creepy...
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I was talking about it with my wife and she had a really good extension: sperm banks. Right now you get some written information about the donor, but can't get anything really detailed. Imagine if you could offer women the opportunity to see what their children might look like based on their DNA and that of the donor. I'm sure that would be a very popular value-added service.
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The broad use and real revenue would be an adult picture of your unborn child or new baby
And even if the technique does not work, you will make money for 20 years before anyone notice this was a scam. How clever!
Old Hat (Score:1)
Looks very generic (Score:1)
And look at the face it is so generic alone in my building it could match a sizeable part of the population. I would not be surprised to learn that it is snake oil.
How Dr. Claes Sees the Technique Being Used (Score:2)
But that's not how Dr. Claes sees the technique being used in a criminal investigation.
Yeah, I can see it being used in a lot of ways. A lot of unsavory ways.
Meanwhile, in Hong Kong ... (Score:3)
Digital face construction from DNA is used to identify people for as simple a crime as throwing a used chewing gum on the street.
http://www.digitaljournal.com/... [digitaljournal.com]
Defense of the Innocent (Score:2)
One very useful outcome is that this could prevent false accusations, false arrests, false inditements and false convictions. The focus tends to be on finding the bad guy but it is even more important to avoid convicting the innocent person. DNA testing does a lot to overturn the convictions of innocent people. This could stop the process of false convictions even earlier.
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kind of related. (Score:1)
http://fusion.net/story/154199... [fusion.net]
We know that Facebook has a vast facial recognition database so good that it can recognize you when your face is hidden, that the FBI has built a millions-strong criminal facial recognition system, and that Googleâ(TM)s new Photos app is so effective at face recognition that it can identify now-adults in photos from their childhood. But now facial recognition is starting to pop up in weird and unexpected places: at music festivals (to identify criminals); at stadiums (to weed out âoesports troublemakersâoe) and at churches. Yes, churches.
It'll reduce the number of suspects by a lot (Score:1)