DTNS WEEKEND: What DNA Databases Can and Cannot Do

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2:20Here's the wild part. Record yourself for just 15 seconds, and HeyGen builds an AI avatar that makes professional videos for you on demand, so you can post everywhere your audience is, as yourself, without filming every time. Your first three videos are free at heygen.com. slash pod. That's H-E-Y-G-E-N dot com slash P-O-D. Welcome to the Daily Tech News Show Weekend Edition. I'm Tom Merritt, and we do these sometimes when we have a topic that we want to dig into a little more and help you understand with a full episode just on this one topic. This weekend, we're talking about the fact that the U.S.

3:00has expanded its collection of DNA information. So let me tell you the story and then we'll talk to Dr. Nikki about how these systems work. U.S. Senator Ron Wyden is requesting that the Department of Homeland Security in the United States and the U.S. Department of Justice explain some details about the collection and storage of DNA information from immigrants. Wyden showed some data indicating from a Freedom of Information request that DHS has stored information on samples from 133 ,000 migrants younger than 18, So more than 133 ,000, but of those stored, 133 ,000 are younger than 18. And they're storing them in the FBI's CODIS database, which is used to identify suspects in violent crimes.

3:45So, of course, I turn to Dr. Nikki to get an understanding of what you can and can't tell from this kind of information. Dr. Nikki, thanks for talking to me about this. Hello, let's have a DNA 101 class. Yes, what is DNA? You get it for free. My students have to pay a lot more for this. nice all right so you know that dna is basically the code that we have in every single cell in our body almost it's like the ones and zeros since we're anti-tnaz uh and whether that's disgusting or not we leave a lot of these cells behind as we move through the world so dead skin hair follicles blood saliva and other bodily fluids can get abandoned with your dna inside of them and if you've ever watched any procedural show, you know that forensics uses these left behind DNA traces to identify people, human remains, and also to do paternity tests.

4:39And it looks really simple on TV, but it's actually pretty complicated in real life. Although I did do a DNA extraction from a banana in high school. So it's not the same. So if you have a big enough sample, you can extract DNA. Generally, you only need about one nanogram of DNA to run these tests. And then you can amplify it with something called PCR. You heard about PCR testing from COVID. It's the same stuff. Okay. So that's the general basics of how DNA works. I often tell people like, look, I'm leaving my DNA everywhere. I can't be too concerned about people having access to my DNA because it's kind of hard to stop.

5:21But it is difficult to, like you say, to extract it and identify it. And then what can you do with it? How do you use that information to tell people apart? Right. So the human genome is similar across like all humans, but there are certain parts, certain genes, like, right, all humans have bones and skin and DNA that tells you to have bones and skin, thankfully. And some regions of the genome have variation, right? We have different color hair and eyes and height. And so those regions will be the ones of interest to tell people apart. And there's a specific area in these called non-coding regions called short tandem repeats or STRs.

6:04And these are picked as the thing to use for identification because they're easily measured and found, and they're pretty comparable between individuals. And so these STRs are really short. They have three or four nucleotides, which are the little building blocks of DNA, and they're repeated sequences. And so the FBI established that there's a frequency at which each STR occurs in each individual specific to different ethnic backgrounds, and this creates a DNA fingerprint. So Tom, the possibility that you and I share the same DNA fingerprint is one in 575 trillion. So you're saying there's a chance.

6:41There's a chance we could be clones, but it's a very tiny chance. So how this works is when you want to ID a suspect from a crime scene, for example, you have to match the STRs from the sample to the person of interest, assuming you have their DNA. And then if they match, you have to do a probability calculation to determine the frequency of the STRs within the ethnic group. And that's what tells you the probability that this is a match. That this is the same. There's a probability calculation in there that can go wrong, but otherwise it's pretty strict. Yeah. So, I mean, this is the kind of thing where if I'm understanding it right, it's a part of the DNA that doesn't code for you to be blue-eyed or blonde-haired because there's lots of other people that have those same codes.

7:31This is something that is not used. It's non-coding. Yeah, we have lots of non-coding parts. And so it can be different in every single person. Up to 575 trillion people can have a different one, and it doesn't really matter because it's not turning into anything. I'm interested in that within the ethnicity, it gives you the percentage because I'm a little confused about that. How does this work and how accurate is it? The ethnicity part basically gives you another kind of bin to narrow it down even further to get those probabilities even smaller. Why can't you just look at the STR data itself?

8:08You can do it overall, but it will be more precise if you do within the ethnic group because of the differences in genetics between different ethnic groups. And this has to do with evolution, right? Like different ethnic groups have different roots originally, and some of them are really far separated. And that leads to different genetics over time. And so that just increases the probability that the genes will be different. I hope that makes sense. Yeah, I guess what I'm getting stuck on is like, well, if the STR is, you know, ABBA and no one else has ABBA, why do I need to know the ethnic group?

8:41um okay it's because you're it it's hard to explain live honestly okay but it's not abba it's like abba times 75 and the specific repetition of abba the number of times it repeats will be more represented in a certain group so like let's say in white people you'll have abba 17 times more frequently and then one g and that's how that like the parts of that will tell you how that's okay i think i think maybe i'm getting it which is there the str is a lot bigger than i'm imagining yeah there's a part you want to look at based on the ethnicity that allows you to narrow in on like that's the part that's going to be different frequency of alleles which is made up of strs within the ethnicity and then within that frequency your sample okay okay that actually that actually makes sense to me i hope sorry i'm not actually a geneticist no no i know and i feel bad pushing you but that definitely helps okay so how accurate is this uh does i assume it doesn't work 100 of the time but how close do we get nothing in science is 100 right well not much at least It's not in biology.

9:55I don't know about physics. But in the legal system, as you know, again, from like CSI, DNA is considered one of the most reliable forms of evidence, but it's not always 100%. Like I said, it's a probability calculation. So there is a chance in 575 trillion that it's a match or not a match. Also, things that really affect this are that DNA isn't always optimally preserved. It degrades really quickly over time with heat and sun rays and different things like that. And you could also only have a really tiny sample left behind that's not enough to amplify for the analysis. And this will actually introduce error because if you amplify something that's degraded or partial, it'll increase – it'll like mess with the frequency of the STRs and give you potentially a false positive.

10:39So that can mess with the results. So overall, it's not 100%, but if you have a really good sample, your chances are pretty good. Got it. So if you're basically – it's like an MP3 compression algorithm. Sure. If it's degraded. And if you over compress an MP3, it doesn't sound like anything anymore. So, you know, it could accidentally match John Cage's silent track or something like that. I think I broke that. You are. You're stretching. Yeah. So once you collect the DNA information, where is it stored? Right. So you collect the DNA and it's stored as like a sequence of nucleotides and letters and stuff.

11:20and specifically uh this creates what we call combined dna index this can be associated to certain identifiers which can also be blinded depending on who gets access to the data so you could just get the dna without saying whose it is depending on but sometimes you want to know who it is if you're trying to convict someone right so the fbi holds this database uh the combined dna index system or codis and they store all these profiles there and historically this database has been used to identify criminal suspects. The idea being that if someone's arrested, they take a DNA sample from them and that potentially people who get arrested are more likely to recommit a crime in the future.

12:00So if they can then find a sample at the crime scene that's of the same person's DNA, they can match them and recognize who's there. And so CODIS is also a software and it uses supercomputers to basically scroll through all these matches and all the giant, it's a massive database, as you can imagine. And it matches between what's stored and what evidence samples there are and see if there are any matches from the STRs. Okay. So this is not a hundred percent, but it is a fairly reliable way to identify if the DNA sample you have, as long as it's not too degraded, is from this person. This database can say like, yeah, we're pretty sure that's Tom's skin cell.

12:42Yep. Okay. What can't this database tell you? Right. So as I mentioned, it's really good at paternity tests because of the way that genes are passed down paternity-wise. From parent to child. But it's not great at other relationships, so it can't match siblings very well. And it can't tell you like, oh, I got this DNA from Tom, and this may or may not be Tom's sibling. I guess I'm very good at that, especially because I don't know if you have any siblings. I do. But yes, right. You wouldn't know from my DNA database. Not quite because it's not that high of a match. And it's even worse at cousins, so specifically.

13:19The farther you get, the worse it gets. That makes sense. You can't do your genealogy really other than your parents from a DNA test. It can also only do exact matches, right? So the person, it will be able to match Tom's toothbrush versus Tom's coffee mug because it's the same DNA. But if the person's DNA is not in the system, it can't match it. And if it's not an exact match, then it will not find the match for you. Wait, what is the toothbrush of the coffee? Like when I leave my DNA on the toothbrush, it'll match the DNA from the coffee mug? Yeah, because those are both your DNA. But if you take your toothbrush and you put it under a UV lamp or out in the sun and it's degraded and you try to match it to your coffee mug, it may not match it.

13:59Yeah, that's not going to work. Okay. Don't do that, though. It's gross. For science, though? Yeah, first of all, maybe for science. And then, yeah, it just can't match. If you're not in the system, you haven't committed any crimes and you didn't give your DNA, then – I will put an anecdote here that sometimes if you've done an ancestry test like 23andMe or something like that, those can be requested by the government for DNA samples. They could be subpoenaed if they have – Thank you. Yes, subpoenaed. If the judge says, you know, there's reasonable suspicion that this person committed a crime 23andMe.

14:33Because you've given your DNA. Yeah, yeah. It's voluntarily given, right? Yeah. episode prep gets messy when research slack threads and script trackers are all in different places that's where chat gpt work comes in give it the goal and connect to the tools where work happens like apps and files and it can help pull the pieces into a draft you can review without you having to re-explain the project at every step for example chat gpt work can gather team feedback from slack and use it to suggest updates to a project brief in google docs you stay in control, reviewing the draft, and deciding what moves forward.

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17:51False positives? uh no yes there can be sorry there can be false positives but it's pretty rare it is based on probability so okay only with the degraded sample was the only thing that you talked about yeah right all right um what do you think we're getting a little more into just the opinion side of this i suppose but but what are some of the uh hurdles to this being totally blame-free? Like what, what are some of the problems with, with this practice? Yeah. So as you can imagine, currently it's illegal to just randomly collect DNA samples without consent. Convicted criminals, this doesn't apply to them.

18:32Or if you voluntarily gave your DNA, that's on you. So I personally don't recommend doing that. But lawyers are arguing that by including DNA from sampled minors who can't really provide consent in CODIS, their data then gets queried every time the database is searched, right? So it They're saying that it treats them as potential suspects. And a recent analysis by the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology says that over a quarter million DNA samples have been added to CODIS in the past four months alone. And it skews to a majority migrant population. And they're calling this a practice that's like genetic surveillance that's actually been increasing in the last few years.

19:14And they're saying that this normalizes the use of genetic profiling. So it's a complicated ethical issue that's based in consent and whether people that are kind of not necessarily convicted as criminals, depending on how the law goes, they take their DNA anyway and add it to the database. And so that's where the question is, is like, well, these people's data is in the database forever. They didn't necessarily agree to it. Are they criminals? It's being under debate in the law. So, yeah, that's where the question is. There's a legal question, not just an ethical question of how things are collected and whether there's proper consent and all of that.

19:54And then there's the slippery slope argument that it sounds like the Georgetown Law Center is making as well. Dr. Nikki, thank you for digging into this and helping us understand this. I really appreciate it. Happy to be here and happy to answer all the tough science questions. No, very, very, very cool. If people want to find more of what you do, where should they go? you can find me at nicoleackermans.com i have the same handle on blue sky and you'll see this posted there shortly hopefully and of course uh we have dr nikki on daily tech news show regularly talking about all kinds of science stuff uh from moa birds to to uh to uh you know all kinds of fun things lots of eyeballs coming later in the month uh so look look forward to that uh you can always send me questions too oh yeah how do they do that On the Discord or email me or contact me through my website.

20:48Sure. Okay. What's the website? NicoleAckermans.com. All right. That is our special weekend edition of Daily Tech News Show Science. Thanks, everybody, for being along for the ride with us. And we will be back with a regular show on Monday. Talk to you then.

21:18The DTNS family of podcasts, helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

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22:44Thank you.