Loss of Privacy

While the USA has introduced legislation banning discrimination based on genes, the UK still thinks it’s a good idea, but for “scientific” purposes.  James Watson, the father of genetics, believes that sequencing your DNA will become routine within the next ten years.

He said that, as the costs of the sequencing technology tumble, doctors will be able to use the information to plan more effective treatments for conditions including mental illness, cancer, obesity and diabetes.

Professor Watson believes that having DNA sequencing on hand will help doctors in their diagnosis of disease at an earlier stage and enable physicians to advise their patients of the best course of action.

Using current technology sequencing a single person’s DNA takes 20 technicians around nine months. “In five years the hope is that you could reduce that to a week with just two or three people,” said Michael Jones, head of the genomics core lab at Imperial College London. “New technologies are trying to eliminate the technicians you need. The idea is you can take someone’s DNA and plug it into a machine and the data will come out.”

Just like Gattaca.  It is difficult to be overjoyed at this when privacy concerns loom large over this entire technology.  There is the benefit of knowing you carry one gene for a debilitating disease, such as cystic fibrosis, used in the article, and then be able to know if your potential spouse has the gene too.  You could prevent having a child that would be subject to such a disease by choosing not to have children with that particular person.  There is also the ability to catch diseases, such as breast cancer, however, the seemingly flippant attitude of scientists makes those with privacy concerns very nervous.

“A woman doesn’t test herself for BRCA1 unless there’s a history of breast cancer in her family. But when the cost comes down, just sequence yourself.”

Just sequence yourself.  It sounds easy.  It probably will be, but who is going to take care to keep that information private?  Since this is being pushed in the UK, will the information be placed into a large database.  Will it be kept private?  Who will assure that your DNA sequencing won’t be used to deny you vital medical services or life insurance policies?

Prof Watson said genetics would help tackle mental illness. At his Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory in the US, scientists have started a project to find the genetic root for every mental condition within 10 years.

Again, on the surface, it appears that this is a great new breakthrough.  Imagine a world where we no longer need to see the mentally retarded, the downs syndrome, and those icky people like Steven Hawking.  Are we really ready for a world where we only want perfect people with no defects?  This technology, while great, has a large upside for abuse and we must be diligent in looking past our own temporary desires for perfect children and a world with no disease before we embrace personal DNA sequencing to solve all society’s ills.

In a new, and slightly scary advancement in technology, fingerprints found at crime scenes can identify unique individual characteristics about a person, including whether the suspect is a smoker, uses drugs, or likes a particular perfume.  Forensic scientists believe that this new information will help in eliminating suspects quicker, as well as narrowing the field of potential criminals at a crime scene.

Fingerprints contain a mixture of skin cells, sweat secretions and substances picked up from elsewhere. Careful analysis can show whether a person may have handled drugs or explosives, but the new tools make it possible to determine a person’s habits from the secretions in their prints as well.

It also appears that the amount of fat in a person’s body could be detected as well.

“It seems people differ in the amount they secrete of the different kinds of lipid,” Jickells says. “The differences aren’t great enough to be able to identify someone specifically, but you could definitely rule out suspects if you found they had produced a lot of one lipid, in contrast to a print at the crime scene.”

The new technique exploits metabolites left in sweat on a person’s fingerprint ridges by using gold nanoparticles.  The new identification method can be used as a quick method in the field, instead of waiting weeks for results to return from the labs.  David Russell, who invented the technique, hopes to modify it to be used in the field, with a portable detector, to find quicker responses to potential outbreaks of diseases, such as avian flu.

The Department of Homeland Security has publicly stated that they want cell phones to have the capability of detecting biological, chemical, and radioactive materials.  Though the user could turn this function off, it would be on by default, making each cell phone user opt-out of this new idea.

Putting hazardous material sensors in commercial cell phones has been discussed in scientific circles for years, according to researchers in the field. More recently, the idea gained support among government agencies, and DHS said publicly in May that it wants businesses to start coming up with proposals.

While, in theory, it sounds like a good idea, it is worrisome that the DHS wants this sort of capability in the hands of the common man.

Cell phone sensors would continually test the air for harmful compounds and digitally relay any information to a central monitoring system if they find anything amiss.

In essence, this gives the government yet another excuse to be able to track an individual, all in the name of protecting innocent Americans.

The cell phone sensors might be less sophisticated than highly advanced ones some developers are fitting into hand-held models, but they would make up for it in what Kelly called “ubiquitous detection.”

If just one went off, it could be ruled a false positive, he said. But if several detected a harmful compound, emergency workers would know there was a problem, triangulate the phone’s location react to the situation.

Currently under the name Cell-All, this technology is still in its infancy.  Though researchers have been toying with the idea for years, there has been little development of the technology.  Several prototypes do exist, but they are costly.  However, with keen interest from the DHS, the idea could be kick-started to life.

Pennsylvania-based eV Products, which manufactures x-ray and gamma ray detection equipment, and Gentag Inc., a company with offices in Washington, D.C., and the Netherlands that designs radio frequency identification (RFID) and other sensors for cell phones are stepping up to the plate. For now, their primarily goal is to create a cell phone-based platform that detects only radiation.

Dartmouth College has done sensor and networking development for the government in the past, and is currently working on MetroSense, a system that can track the movements of people over large areas in real-time. George Cybenko, one of the engineering professors on the project, said “several technological breakthroughs would have to happen” before Cell-All would work.

There are also many problems that prevent widespread use of such technologies.  GPS doesn’t work well indoors, making it unreliable to detect and pinpoint locations inside.  There is the cost of tiny sensors that fit into a cell phone, as well as battery power to consider.  Still, others are finding obstacles to creating accurate sensors, due to the natural occurring radiation on Earth.

One particular challenge for eV Products researchers has been coming up with a sensor that can tell the difference between harmless and dangerous radiation, Smith said.

In the chemical and biological worlds, he said, dangerous compounds are rare. But, “in contrast, radiation is a problem, because when you pick up radiation in the world, 99 percent of it is supposed to be there.”

Scientists are already floating around the possibilities of swapping out sensors to detect different things, as well as devices with sensors permanently attached.  Much like the many different types of cell phone covers, you could keep up with the latest fad by swapping out your sensor.  Today biological sensors, tomorrow radioactive.

Martin Dudziak, founder, chairman and chief science officer of Tetrad Technologies Group, Inc., has said they already have the technology for joining the sensors to networking.

Dudziak said he wants to integrate a cell phone sensor feature into Nomad Eyes, a digital network his company created. Tetrad encourages people with camera- and Internet-enabled cell phones to send data to Nomad Eyes, which will then analyze it and forward it to the proper authorities.

He said his company already has a hand-held biological sensor that can detect tuberculosis, influenza, salmonella, e. Coli and hepatitis, and is ready to put similar hardware in phones.

If all this sounds familiar, maybe it’s because you’ve watched too much Star Trek and are realizing that this is a primitive form of a tricorder.

There are also other problems, such as calibration of the units that will ultimately need to be dealt with.

Bob Durstenfeld, director of corporate marketing for RAE Systems Inc., a San Jose, Calif., company that makes hand-held sensors, as well as systems that have been used at Super Bowls and Presidential inaugurations, said sensors will not stay reliable without frequent service.

Durstenfeld added that he does not see the advantage of a cell phone network over a simpler solution, such as putting sophisticated biological, chemical and radiation sensors on all first-responder vehicles.

Ultimately, the issue over privacy concerns will need to be addressed.  While this could be a useful, first response technology, intrusion into the privacy of individuals will have to be considered before implementation can occur.  Americans already have many intrusions into their lives, such as CCTV cameras, that they cannot control.

We shouldn’t get too excited over this new technology but we should keep an eye on it.  It isn’t quite practical, yet, but there will be a market for it.  Right now, there are many initiatives that need humans that can, and will, be implemented long before your cell phone detects radiation.

On the heels of an announcement in America that will ban discrimination based on genetic predisposition, the British have announced that they will begin screening out embryos for a couple that have a severe squinting defect.

The Bridge Centre family clinic, in London, has been licensed to treat a businessman and his wife to create the baby. Both the businessman and his father suffer from the condition, which causes the eyes only to look downwards or sideways.

The licence was granted by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) to Prof Gedis Grudzinskas, who believes the landmark ruling marks a shift away from granting licences only for life-threatening conditions.

He added that he would seek to screen for any genetic factor at all that would cause a family severe distress.

Critics, however, believe that this is the first step down the road to tampering with genes, merely for cosmetic value.  Who decides what kind of distress is severe for a family?  How low will the bar be set?  When asked, the doctor admitted that he would consider screening for particular hair colors because some hair colors cause more bullying, which causes more stress, which causes depression and, eventually, suicide.  So, if parents can convince the doctor that their red-headed child is going to be bullied, they can stop the red hair in its tracks, thus eliminating the possibility of suicide.

What a load of crap!  These doctors claim that they will take each case on its own merits, when, in reality, they are getting rich off of other people’s insecurities.  While this is an interesting development in the field of science, it is indeed skirting that fine line near the slippery slope.  It is laudable that doctors wish to save small children years of surgeries for serious, life-threatening, and debilitating defects, however, we have to consider the consequences.

Far too many people are superficial and would relish the opportunity to “create” their perfect child, free from any defects and with just the right hair and eye color.  If these doctors are not careful, they will set a precedence of creating cosmetically enhanced children, where nature should be the only thing intervening.  We need to keep a close eye on such practices and remember that we should not play God so much or we risk eliminating that which makes us different, and human.

In some very cool news, Wired has detailed a story about Stanford researchers, Dennis Grahn and Craig Heller, who have developed a glove with a cooling system and a vacuum that chills blood vessels, drastically reducing fatigue.

Grahn and his colleagues developed the Glove for the military — specifically, for the Pentagon’s way-out science division, Darpa: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

By 2001, military strategists had determined that the best way to deal with emerging transnational threats was with small groups of fast-moving soldiers, not hulking pieces of military hardware. But small groups rarely travel with medics — they have to be hardy enough to survive on their own. So what goes on in Grahn’s dank little lab at Stanford is part of a much larger push to radically improve the performance, mental capacity, and resilience of American troops — to let them run harder and longer, operate without sleep, overcome deadly injury, and tap the potential of their unconscious minds.

The Glove can also work in reverse as the scientists are testing a “warming” version, allowing the wearer to overcome the cold.

Of course, the Glove is an asset to any military or athletic organization, but it also has applications for those with medical conditions, such as strokes, multiple sclerosis, and waking from anesthesia.  There will also be other commercial uses for the Glove, possibly similar to the Cool Shirt market.

I know.  I know.  I should be discussing the myriad ethical conundrums that arise from this but, I’m just too excited over the “cool” factor of having exoskeletons for the military and, possibly, each individual. I should be writing about the abuses of making superhumans, which could lead to prejudices and using the technology to oppress others.  But, visions of Solid Snake, Soldier, and Universal Soldier linger in my minds as I think about how cool this will be for the military.  It will also be great if they can extend the Glove to an external body suit.  I get giddy just thinking about an such an exoskeleton so, maybe, I’ll write about bioethics later, after I’m not so giddy.