Alec Jeffreys: The Father of the DNA Evidence warns of Database usage

It's 25 years since Alec Jeffreys made the accidental discovery of the first DNA fingerprint, which transformed forensics – and his life.

The first DNA "fingerprint" was a murky pattern on X-ray film. Did you realise the potential of what you had stumbled upon?

On that Monday morning 25 years ago I remember putting the light on, looking at the patterns and thinking "what a horrible mess". Then the penny dropped. We realised the potential for DNA identification within about a minute and then the possible applications came flooding in. By evening we had a pretty good shopping list of the stuff that DNA could, theoretically, be applied to.

DNA fingerprinting has enabled so much, from solving crimes and paternity disputes to freeing innocent prisoners from death row. Is there one story that stands out for you?

The first case we ever did. It was an immigration dispute involving a young lad threatened with deportation from the UK. We did a DNA test, showed he was a full member of his family, and the immigration tribunal dropped the case. I was there when his mother was told. That was the magic moment for me, when I saw the science move into a very different realm.

DNA databases attract controversy, especially in the UK where DNA profiles gathered by police are retained regardless of guilt. How should we deal with that?

Databases should be governed through proper legislation that prohibits the taking and retention of entirely innocent people's DNA. That's a major violation of the Human Rights Act.

Is it really such a problem to be on a database?

Having your DNA on a database - to be branded the same as a criminal - is painful for a considerable number of people. And I've not heard those people have a voice in this debate.

What are the biggest issues for DNA technology in the future?

Not so far down the track, you'll be able to send a mouth swab off and get a complete genome sequence back - all 3000 million bases. Then there will be a million-and-one issues. Who stores the data? Who owns it? The idea that I can plough around my genome willy-nilly finding out fun things about me - that could have a very big impact on family members too. Because my genome is mine, but really it's not - I share it.

What mind-boggling future applications of DNA sequencing do you foresee?

The idea of finding out someone's surname from their DNA might sound completely bonkers, but it's not. Also miniaturisation: getting a lab-on-a-chip you can take out to a crime scene. But the Holy Grail for the field is to get instant DNA typing, to get it in 1 second flat. Then you have DNA entering the world of real-time security.

What does that mean in practice?

Imagine going to the supermarket 20 years from now. To use your credit card, you don't have a PIN that everyone can see. Instead, you spit on something, and there's a little DNA detector that says "yeah, that's right". And away you go.

Profile
Alec Jeffreys is a geneticist at the University of Leicester, UK. In 1984 he invented genetic fingerprinting, which identifies individuals based on their DNA. He was knighted in 1994

Children's Fear of Adults Re-enforced

Last month in Bedfordshire, 270 children from four primary schools had their annual sports day without the normal audience of proud parents watching them compete.

All adults were banned except teachers.

The reason? The organisers could not guarantee that an unsupervised adult might not molest a child.

They preferred the certainty of ruining the pleasure of hundreds, and the instilling of general paranoia, to the phenomenally slight possibility of a sexual attack.

This is part of an insidious new orthodoxy that’s taking hold: that only authorised adults have any business engaging with children. It is no longer just about sexual abuse.

In Twickenham last month the mother of a five– year-old who was being bullied decided to talk to the offender. She knelt by his chair and asked him politely to stop. The next day she was banned from the classroom for doing something that would have been regarded as rational and responsible behaviour at any other time in the past century.

Much worse was to happen a few days later to Anisa Borsberry, from Tyne and Wear, whose 11-year-old was being bullied by agroup of girls. She, too, asked the bullies to stop. In retaliation, and knowing what a powerful weapon this was to use against an adult, the girls claimed Borsberry had assaulted them. Within hours they admitted lying.

Nevertheless, the accusation of assault against a child is regarded as so serious that Borsberry was handcuffed in her home and held in police cells for five hours before hearing that no further action was being taken.

Or there is the case of Carol Hill, the Essex dinner lady threatened with dismissal for telling a mother she was sorry her daughter had been tied up and whipped in the playground. Normal, empathetic human behaviour, you might think. That wasn’t the school’s reaction. Hill was suspended for breaching “pupil confidentiality”.

In every one of these cases a woman has been punished for daring to do what adults have always done in every society: uphold norms of behaviour by talking about them. But it has blown up in their faces because new unwritten rules about engaging with children are apparently being invented every day. The extent of society’s neurosis means the consequences of approaching children are becoming alarmingly unpredictable.

Twitter and Facebook attacked by the DoS Bots: Who was affected?

The recent outages to Twitter and Facebook were allegedly directed at a Georgian 'dissident', in an attempt to censor what he was broadcasting.

The wider questions concern Twitter and the silent majority who are using the service, the ones who were hardest hit by the outage.

I hesitate to say users or people because the short answer is; that the most frequent users of Twitter are the News Streams and Info Bots. Followed rapidly by the Marketeers!

Sysmos Twitter Analysis

A couple of months ago, social media analytics firm Sysomos closely conducted an analysis of the people on Twitter and how the service was being used. What it found, among other things, was that five percent (5%) of Twitter’s 11.5 million accounts post about 75% of all the tweets. That's an outstanding result and it led the firm to dig deeper into that magical five percent (5%).

The Pareto Principle

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. This is clearly not the case with Twitter.

Analysis Results Released
This week, the company released the results of the deeper study and highlighted a few important findings about that elite five percent:

• 32 percent of all tweets made by that active group were generated by machine bots that posted more than 150 tweets per day.
• The number of machine-generated tweets is probably greater because many of the bots post fewer than 150 times a day.
• Based on the two reports, it appears that nearly one-quarter (24 percent) of all tweets overall are generated by those active bots.

Twitter Spammer Bots

However, these bots are essential Twitter spammers. These are the automated tweets that comes from valid sources, e.g. news services. Most Technical websites and Blogs will encourgae you to foolow their sites via an automated Twitter feed.

Sysmos CEO

In a blog post, Sysomos co-founder and CEO Nick Koudas said:

"It’s a fascinating exercise to really focus on the most enthusiastic Twitter users, and what they are doing. Our findings, particularly the percentage of tweets contributed by bots, is definitely eye-opening and we hope they shed light on how Twitter is used today and by whom.

We think this is one of the first reports to focus on the most active members of the Twitter community to provide interesting insight and perspective. We will continue our updates with additional analysis of the micro-blogging service."

Note Bene

Also worth noting is that;

• 88 percent of this active group, posts at least once a day. Of that group,
  
• about one-third joined this year, compared to the
  
• 72 percent of all Twitter users are new this year.
  

Keywords
Lastly, the most popular keywords within the bios for those active users included: Internet marketing, music lover, Web designer, video games, and husband/father.