Daily Archives: March 5, 2015

Zac Rebekah I It #39;s in his DNA
All rights belongs to TVD/TO and the movie 17 Again + Little Mix. Well, there #39;s no real story. I just watched this movie a couple of days ago and Zac was soooo handsome in this film, I had...

By: Regina Rose Black

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Zac & Rebekah I It's in his DNA - Video

D.C. prosecutors have stopped sending DNA evidence to the citys new state-of-the-art crime lab after they said they discovered errors in the way analysts determined whether a sample can be linked to a suspect or a victim.

Prosecutors have hired two outside DNA experts to review 116 cases, including rapes and homicides, and have been notifying defense attorneys.

In one federal case, prosecutors said, the D.C. lab concluded that a defendants DNA could have been on the magazine of a gun seized as evidence. But an expert who reviewed the data said the lab should have interpreted the results to mean that the defendant was not the source of the DNA.

In other cases, prosecutors said, the lab either understated or overestimated the likelihood that a particular persons DNA was left at a crime scene.

Officials at the Department of Forensic Sciences, which is located in a $220million facility that opened in 2012, defend their work and say disagreements among scientists in the field are not uncommon. The dispute has essentially created a standoff between the city-run lab and federal prosecutors in the nations capital.

U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr. said that his office has been paying to send evidence for testing at outside labs, and that so far an additional 102 cases have been farmed out. At the same time, independent experts are taking a fresh look at the cases analyzed by the Districts lab.

To date, we have not found any evidence to suggest any wrongful conviction and have not acted to dismiss any cases, Machen said in a statement. However, in an abundance of caution, we are conducting a rigorous review of the analysis done in current and older cases to ensure that criminal defendants are treated fairly.

Max M. Houck, the director of the Department of Forensic Sciences, said that the lab follows the same protocols in place at many city and state labs across the country, and that experts may disagree on how to interpret evidence. The lab has made recent improvements, he said, but he stands by the work done before those changes.

This is an estimate an estimate of probability, said Houck, a former FBI supervisor who worked in the agencys anthropology and trace evidence unit.

The issue is that their experts would do the analysis differently. Differently isnt wrong, Houck said. Its like a financial planner doing a financial assessment of someones net worth in U.S. currency and in Japanese yen. Theyre both correct, just different measurements.

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D.C. prosecutors criticize city crime labs handling of some DNA evidence

If anyone had devised a way to create a genetically engineered baby, I figured George Church would know about it.

At his labyrinthine laboratory on the Harvard Medical School campus, you can find researchers giving E. Coli a novel genetic code never seen in nature. Around another bend, others are carrying out a plan to use DNA engineering to resurrect the woolly mammoth. His lab, Church likes to say, is the center of a new technological genesisone in which man rebuilds creation to suit himself.

When I visited the lab last June, Church proposed that I speak to a young postdoctoral scientist named Luhan Yang, a Harvard recruit from Beijing whod been a key player in developing a new, powerful technology for editing DNA called CRISPR-Cas9. With Church, Yang had founded a company called eGenesis to engineer the genomes of pigs and cattle, sliding in beneficial genes and editing away bad ones.

As I listened to Yang, I waited for a chance to ask my real questions: Can any of this be done to human beings? Can we improve the human gene pool? The position of much of mainstream science has been that such meddling would be unsafe, irresponsible, and even impossible. But Yang didnt hesitate. Yes, of course, she said. In fact, the laboratory had a project to determine how it could be achieved. She flipped open her laptop to a PowerPoint slide titled Germline Editing Meeting.

Here it was: a technical proposal to alter human heredity.

Germ line is biologists jargon for the egg and sperm, which combine to form an embryo. By editing the DNA of these cells or the embryo itself, it could be possible to eliminate disease genes and to pass those genetic fixes on to future generations. Such a technology could be used to rid families of scourges like cystic fibrosis. It might also be possible to install genes that offer lifelong protection against infection, Alzheimers, and, Yang told me, maybe the effects of aging. These would be history-making medical advances that could be as important to this century as vaccines were to the last.

The fear is that germ line engineering is a path toward a dystopia of super people and designer babies for those who can afford it.

Thats the promise. The fear is that germ line engineering is a path toward a dystopia of super people and designer babies for those who can afford it. Want a child with blue eyes and blond hair? Why not design a highly intelligent group of people who could be tomorrows leaders and scientists?

CRISPR was discovered only three years ago but is already widely used by biologists as a kind of search-and-replace tool to alter DNA, even down to the level of a single letter. Its so precise that its widely expected to turn into a promising new approach for gene therapy treatment in people with devastating illnesses. The idea is that physicians could directly correct a faulty gene, say, in the blood cells of a patient with sickle-cell anemia (see Genome Surgery). But that kind of gene therapy wouldnt affect germ cells, and the changes in the DNA wouldnt get passed to future generations.

In contrast, the genetic changes created by germ line engineering would be passed on, and thats what has always made the idea seem so objectionable. So far, caution and ethical concerns have had the upper hand. A dozen countries, not including the United States, have banned germ line engineering, and scientific societies have unanimously concluded that it would be too risky to do. The European Unions convention on human rights and biomedicine says tampering with the gene pool would be a crime against human dignity and human rights.

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Engineering the Perfect Baby