By Chris Bartholomew
If you thought DNA was a science that couldn't be duplicated, think again. DNA evidence has put many criminals behind bars, solved cases, pointed to the suspect in irrefutable evidence, but now, techs will have to test the DNA to see that it's authentic. How many cases will end in 'reasonable doubt' now that it's been found that it can be faked? How many cases will this new technology re-open?
There is a test (Profiler Plus) that can authenticate samples, and the fabrication of DNA will soon make it almost impossible for law enforcement not to authenticate DNA for maintaining the high credibility of DNA evidence in the judiciary system. The maker of Profiler Plus hopes to sell the test to forensics laboratories. They have shown that it is possible to make fake DNA from a drinking cup or cigarette butt.
DNA fabrication has only (so far as we know) been done in a laboratory. But we can see the implication. If you sell a gun that is registered in your name and someone is murdered with it, though you probably won't be cast as a murder suspect, you might have to come up with an alibi, and if someone replicates YOUR DNA at a murder scene, well, the implications are not good. It will be interesting if someone does come up with this now that the cat is out of the bag and it is possible.
Editor's note: this was written in 2009, in the weeks after an Israeli forensics company published a paper showing that a DNA profile could be manufactured in a laboratory from a sample as small as the traces on a cup or a cigarette end, and planted at a scene. One detail in the second paragraph has the names crossed. Profiler Plus is a standard profiling kit, the sort of assay that reads a sample and produces the profile; it is not the authentication test, and its manufacturer is not the company that made the demonstration. The authentication assay was the one the same researchers proposed alongside the paper, distinguishing natural DNA from amplified DNA by looking for the methylation that manufactured samples lack. The article's real question is the one it opens with, and seventeen years on the answer is that nothing came of it in court. This archive's roster records wrongful convictions from mistaken identification, from false confession, from withheld evidence and from discredited forensic science, and none from fabricated DNA. The technique remains a laboratory result, which is where the author left it.