Glyn Moody reports via TechDirt
Kuwait has the dubious honor of being the first nation to require everyone's DNA--including that of visitors to the country. The Kuwait Times has a frighteningly matter-of-fact article about the plan, which is currently being put into operation. Here's how the DNA will be gathered:
Collecting samples from citizens will be done by various mobile centers that will be moved according to a special plan amongst government establishments and bodies to collect samples from citizens in the offices they work in. In addition, fixed centers will be established at the interior ministry and citizen services centers to allow citizens [to] give samples while doing various transactions.
Those who are not citizens of Kuwait will be sampled when they apply for residence permits:
Collection will done on issuing or renewing residency visas through medical examinations done by the health ministry for new residency visas and through the criminal evidence department on renewing them.
As for common-or-garden[-variety] visitors to the country:
Collection will be done at a special center at Kuwait International Airport, where in collaboration with the Civil Aviation Department, airlines, and embassies, visitors will be advised on their rights and duties towards the DNA law.
[...] The DNA will not be used for medical purposes, such as checking for genetic markers of disease, which will avoid issues of whether people should be told about their predisposition to possibly serious illnesses. Nor will the DNA database be used for "lineage or genealogical reasons". That's an important point: a complete nation's DNA would throw up many unexpected paternity and maternity results, which could have massive negative effects on the families concerned. It's precisely those kinds of practical and ethical issues that advocates of wider DNA sampling and testing need to address, but rarely do.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by inertnet on Sunday January 31 2016, @01:49PM
My opinion is that this is an unfortunate but ultimately inevitable development in human society. I expect this to be the norm for the developed world someday in the far future. Which leads me to a theory I've been thinking about.
Purely theoretically I've been wondering if it would be possible to reconstruct the DNA of previous generations if you have the DNA of a whole population. And then step by step go back generation by generation, so you'll end up with a DNA database of people who have been dead for centuries. You could even match that data up with wars, massacres and environmental disasters in the past. I'm wondering how far back you could go, provided you have the computing power to do this reconstruction work on that scale.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 31 2016, @03:00PM
Purely theoretically I've been wondering if it would be possible to reconstruct the DNA of previous generations if you have the DNA of a whole population. And then step by step go back generation by generation, so you'll end up with a DNA database of people who have been dead for centuries. You could even match that data up with wars, massacres and environmental disasters in the past. I'm wondering how far back you could go, provided you have the computing power to do this reconstruction work on that scale.
This is not possible. You only contain half the genetic material of each of your parents, so 50% of the genetic information is discarded. If you have a brother of sister, you could reconstruct about 75% of both of your parent's genetic information... but you will never reach 100% with more brothers or sisters. If you have a generation with only girls, the Y chromosome of the father can't be recovered. This is not even taking into discount lethal factors or mutations that happenbetween generations.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by inertnet on Sunday January 31 2016, @07:52PM
Indeed you can't seem to do this with the information of just one generation. But you have to imagine the whole tree with many branches. Every family has its own tree and all these trees are interconnected in many ways and into themselves even. So while you can't calculate parents from children straight away, it might be possible if you consider all possible connections over many generations. In the end there's (hopefully) just one set of connections that would fit. You start with almost an infinite number of equations with an almost infinite number of variables, but it should be possible to reduce those, based on the data set you start with. Which is the DNA of the current population, enhanced with any DNA of previous generations that is available.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday January 31 2016, @08:06PM
It *is* impossible, but the problem is slightly less intractable than you are predicting for those who left descendents-at-the-current-time. The reason it's less intractable is that a large amount of the DNA is common to all people. You still couldn't reach 100%, but the rate of decrease is significantly slower than you are suggesting.
OTOH, the majority of people in most generations died without surviving offspring. Just consider, if you go back two generations families of 5 or 6 children were not unusual. Back a bit further and they try to get even larger. If most of those had survived then the population explosion would have happened a LOT earlier. As it is it waited until the development of sanitation and other public health measures. (And anti-biotics helped, I'd be dead without them, but public health was more significant.) So reconstructing them would be a task for either a time-machine, or an IMMENSE archeological dig, followed by and IMMENSE amount of DNA extraction. And some of them still wouldn't have surviving DNA molecules.
Thinking a bit more deeply, I think the time-machine is the most plausible solution.
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