DNAFYI

I've finally gotten around to reading Justice Minister Simon Power's reply to my various qualms over the DNA testing regime, the use of DNA samples for familial testing in particular. In fairness to the haranguing I've had over this law, here's the one page official reply:

DNAFYI

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I wouldn't use the term "happy", but my vast concerns over the portability of DNA testing is somewhat sated. There's still the possibilities of data security to furrow the brow, but Marie Schroff at the Privacy Commission is advocating strongly over this anyway and on a wider front.

A rough cut of DNA

It's 10 o'clock on Sunday night and the DNA Rape Bill submissions are due in to the J&E select committee first thing Monday morning. While my concerns about the Bill remain unabated, I'm just not up to pulling an all nighter on this thing.

I have had only the most cursory of readings of it (hey, there's the Tokyo phonebook-sized Auckland Governance Report as well. According to the Nats, a decision on the Greater Auckland democratic structure is to made in the next week. According to Rodney Hide, deliberation will be somewhat longer. What's up with that?).

But back to the DNA thing. One of my source materials was going to be Patrick Gower's report in the Herald:

Details and cost estimates remain vague but the Weekend Herald has learned that in its first year the law change is expected to add a further 25,000-27,000 DNA profiles to the national databank, which is held by Environmental Science and Research on behalf of the police.

The ESR is going to make a good clip of cash out of this. How much does each DNA test cost? Is this the same ESR who have been pushing for random drug tests in the workplace as well? Tests that the ESR would perform to their profit? Just how thin is the line between the police database and the private practise stuff?

Even allowing for a gradual drop-off in numbers as police catch repeat offenders, the databank is likely to at least double within five years from 90,000 to 180,000 profiles - about 4 per cent of all New Zealanders...

The Government wants to extend the law to cover all imprisonable offences by the end of 2011. It predicts the full law change will catch an extra 445 criminals each year, mainly for high-volume crimes such as burglary.

If this passes into law, it would be interesting to revisit these statistical arguments in favour after 2011, once the whole enchilada is served. For the price of every arrestee's DNA on record, this is the best case scenario for why it is being done. Not impressed. Back to Gower's story:

Meanwhile, Privacy Commissioner Marie Shroff has added her voice to the warnings against passing the bill in its current form. In a letter to Mr Power obtained by the Weekend Herald, she urges the Government to appoint an independent committee to oversee the expanded databank and reassure the public it will not be misused.

In a separate letter she also questions the need to take DNA samples for all imprisonable crimes, which would cover low-level offences such as littering and lighting bonfires.

Treasury officials have dismissed the costings for the scheme as inadequate and Labour claims it will take an extra $20 million a year to pay for DNA collection and testing, plus extra prosecutions and prison beds.

In short, I think that the argument in favour of expansion is very weak. The price is too high. Correspondence from Simon Power, while gratefully received, still fails to sell it to me:

Power Dna

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We're looking at a pool of 8,000 unsolved DNA crime scene samples. These do not all represent damning evidence. At very best it is corroborative evidence. It places the DNA owner to the location, not the crime. Any two-bit law criminal student could tell you that. Oversell. Just how many unsolved crimes have been resolved under the existing DNA database?

I appreciate the wording of this part especially: "The DNA profile currently used by ESR is only a very small portion of the individual's total DNA profile and can only be deciphered by a select group of specialist scientists. The only specific personal information that can be deuced from the sequence of numbers that makes up the DNA profile is whether the person is male or female."

This black box process of DNA databasing is not easy to determine from a quick cruise through the ESR's website and the existing Bodily Samples Act. What method of recording is it? Can familial searches be made with it? How many alleles do ESR match, etc. Yeah, I should have emailed off to the ESR to get more detail on the process, but I never got around to it (Neither did the MSM, so I don't feel bad).

I understand how fingerprinting works. I can replicate them, easy as a leaky biro. While DNA reading is not quite within layperson's reach at present, we must put our trust in the ESR. An ESR who are not above colluding with the police, if the insinuations in this Media7 slot are to be believed (On an M7 tangent, Simon Pound's lesson last week on the OIA is a classic).

A thought occurs. Say an ESR worker got a bit slappy in town one Friday night off duty and ended up getting arrested for, let's say, causing a public disturbance. Their DNA would end up getting sampled by their employer. How would the ESR respond if one of their staff got pinged on a matter unrelated to their work? Could they, would they ignore it? Employment lawyers would have a field day.

And then there's the broader worries, wonderfully outlined in this DNA database debate over at the Economist. Like the voting for this debate, my opinion on the Bodily Samples Amendment Bill has not changed considerably over time. The proposed expansion of the DNA database is an unwarranted, under-budgeted, over-promised bit of law that projectile vomits over the Bill of Rights Act.

DNA Ethics Debate

The Economist is hosting a debate on the timely topic of DNA databases (this Wednesday NZ time):

"This house believes that people's DNA sequences are their business, and nobody else's."

For: Professor Arthur Caplan - Emmanuel and Robert Hart Professor of Bioethics and Director, Centre for Bioethics, Penn University.

Against: Mr J. Craig Venter - Founder and president of the J. Craig Venter Institute and founder and CEO of Synthetic Genomic.

Contraindication Station

The future is fractal. I said as much to the pre-election Health select committee considering the medicinal cannabis petition last year. The exact words were a path of "individuated medical treatments" when challenged on the "cannabis for everyone" question from, off memory, current Health Minister Tony Ryall.

While humans share an intolerance for obvious Kryptonites such as cyanide and arsenic, our individual mutations splinter into a myriad of pluses and negatives. I can eat as many peanuts as the next monkey, but don't give me penicillin. I once knew a girl who was allergic to bee stings and carried a hypodermic of adrenalin, another was diabetic and carried insulin.

A generation before mine, I would have been fed Alexander Fleming's bread mould as required, as it was better than any other medicine they had at their disposal. Tough luck on the side effects. Before adrenaline and the invention of the hypodermic, my old friend probably faced a life of seclusion or death by bee. It was just over a hundred years ago that snake oil salesmen still sold quack remedies for diabetes, as so little about the condition was understood.

And these are just some obvious examples. Feel free to supplant these with your own experiences. I never learned Latin well enough to pronounce the names of some of these concoctions, that only doctors, didgeridoo players and Tim Shadbolt can say in one go. But everyone learns to pronounce their own medicine when the need arises.

I say all this in preamble in order to provide some context in what might seem to be an imminent and apparent contradiction on the role of DNA for the public good. After all, earlier this month I beat a fairly loud drum about the police DNA database for alleged criminals and how bad it is. OK, are you prepared?

It's this fascinating little gizmo:

From a drop of saliva or cheek swab [this handheld device] can analyse DNA to tell if a patient has the right genetic fit for a particular drug. The Snip Doctor looks for known single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) - single letter changes in the genetic code - that can affect an individual's response to medical treatment.

This little thing, if it works as advertised, has the potential to diagnose reliably and more accurately than ever before. The potential to revolutionise treatment is huge. Until we can get all those doctors out of cosmetic surgery and back to doing something useful, this device could spread the load of monitoring patient conditions as well as, and here's the apparent contradiction, feed back into the cloud of medical knowledge.

Yes, that raises the prospect of some form of database. But one tempered by doctor-patient confidentiality and other (future?) relevant legal protections, as opposed to the police database scheme. The reasons for collection vary greatly too. A medical DNA database would provide phenomenal insight into the intricacies of pharmacological treatment to NZ's inhabitants.

Take, for example, Maori. Diseases foreign to their race came across with the immigrants in the 19th Century and ravaged their people. Generic overseas tests do not easily accommodate for our unique and complex genetic and environmental heritage. The more information that can be gathered and fed into the general knowledge, the more it can benefit the infirm.

Meantime, the jury is still out on the fate and use of Guthrie cards, according to the latest Privacy Commission newsletter:

The Privacy Commissioner has made a submission to the National Screening Unit (NSU) about the collection, retention and secondary use of the newborn bloodspot samples... The Privacy Commissioner also addressed the need for legislation to regulate secondary use of samples and ongoing governance. She said there were also concerns about the information that was currently available to new parents and the consent gathering process.

If you were born in NZ from 1970ish onwards, somewhere there's a card with your baby blood on it. That's a Guthrie card. What can it be used for? Well, that's a bit unclear. As you can tell from the above statement, the fate of this DNA-testable card of your quotable soul is still moot.

There is so much good possible, but also risks of grave social harm if abused. What do you reckon? Should the cops get your code before your doctor? What would you like done with your Guthrie card?