Tuesday, August 18, 2009

A spanner in the DNA database

Hot on the heels of Aussie cops rarking up hackers enough for them to be bothered cracking some ice, it looks like Israeli scientists have found a way to fabricate DNA:
“You can just engineer a crime scene,” said Dan Frumkin, lead author of the paper, which has been published online by the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics. “Any biology undergraduate could perform this.”
How long will it be before someone works out how methylate loci in artificial DNA, the report's one test to spot the difference? Whichever way you slice it though, that's really rooted the DNA crime database idea now. First hackers, now fakers. What next, a plague of worms? HT /.