Even if you've never taken a DNA test, a distant relative could reveal your identity

The idea that the people who have been traveling to the country have recently been caught up in the past. This spring, genetic genealogy has helped California police identify a serial killer and rapist in a grisly, decades-old cold case. But the new study, published in the journal Science, drives home the reality that this was not an outlier; A majority of Americans of European descent could be matched to a third cousin or closer using an open-access genetic genealogy database.

"Each individual in the database is a beacon of genetic information, and this beacon illuminates hundreds of individuals – remote relative connected to this person via their family tree," said Yaniv Erlich, chief science officer of the direct-to-consumer genetics company MyHeritage, who led the study.

Erlich and colleagues then showed how to match a person and a person who was able to participate in a research project. A separate study found that even the minimal DNA could be cross-referenced with generic data to identify relatives.

"This is one of the crossroads of where science and technology and law and ethics meet," said Frederick Bieber, a medical geneticist at Brigham and Women's Hospital, who is in charge of crime and public defenders' offices. "Both of these papers are very important because they … are the issue that we collectively, are beginning to face-head-on: Where do our privacy expectations interfere with the natural social instinct for public safety?"

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The public is overwhelmingly supportive of police investigations of genetic websites to violent violent crimes, according to a recent survey published in PLOS Biology. Leading consumer genetics companies, et al. The website commonly used in law enforcement cases, GEDmatch, is an open-access genetic genealogy database, and people must voluntarily decide to upload their genetic profile.

"Curtis Rogers, co-administrator of GEDmatch, wrote in an email, adding that the new finding merits" serious consideration. "

Despite company efforts to reassure and educate consumers by explaining their policies, ethicists and some researchers still do not think about it. about remote family members.

Erlich said that early in his academic career, leaders in the field warned him that studying privacy and genetics was a "dangerous career path" and urged him to study.

"Now it's the opposite. Everybody understands genetic privacy is important. It's not something we need to sweep under the rug – we need empirical evidence, and we can not get it, ways to mitigate the risk, how it changes, "Erlich said.

Erlich and colleagues found that a genetic database containing just 2 percent of a target population could lead to a third cousin or closer match for almost anyone. They wrote that "the technique could imply some U.S. individual of European descent in the near future." Most people whose DNA is in genealogy databases of European ancestry.

But CeCe Moore, an investigative genetic genealogist with Parabon NanoLabs, who works to solve real criminal cases, said that the study grossly oversimplifies the difficulty of using a match to find someone's identity. While she agrees that a sizable proportion of the US population can be matched to at least a second or third cousin in an open genealogy database, information – such as the age and family tree – that the academic researchers used in their sample case.

"They capture the power of genetic genealogy, but not really the complexities of doing the work," Moore said. "They make a lot of assumptions that are not in line with reality; it seems they're assuming some head-starts we do not necessarily have in our work. "