Police can collect DNA from arrestees, court says

http://hosted2.ap.org/TXWAC/8ef5320729ce4298abefc1903704c7d5/Article_2013-06-03-Supreme%20Court-DNA%20Collection/id-971679d42ffb4e1491ddac7f0bb96a1d

A sharply divided Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for police to take a DNA swab from anyone they arrest for a serious crime, endorsing a practice now followed by more than half the states as well as the federal government.

The justices differed strikingly on how big a step that was.

“Taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court’s five-justice majority. The ruling backed a Maryland law allowing DNA swabbing of people arrested for serious crimes.

But the four dissenting justices said the court was allowing a major change in police powers, with conservative Justice Antonin Scalia predicting the limitation to “serious” crimes would not last.

“Make no mistake about it: Because of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason,” Scalia said in a sharp dissent which he read aloud in the courtroom. “This will solve some extra crimes, to be sure. But so would taking your DNA when you fly on an airplane — surely the TSA must know the ‘identity’ of the flying public. For that matter, so would taking your children’s DNA when they start public school.“

Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler agreed that there’s nothing stopping his state from expanding DNA collection from those arrested for serious crimes to those arrested for lesser ones like shoplifting.

“I don’t advocate expanding the crimes for which you take DNA, but the legal analysis would be the same,” Gansler said. “The reason why Maryland chooses to only take DNA of violent criminals is that you’re more likely to get a hit on a previous case. Shoplifters don’t leave DNA behind, rapists do, and so you’re much more likely to get the hit in a rape case.”

Twenty-eight states and the federal government now take DNA swabs after arrests. But a Maryland court said it was illegal for that state to take Alonzo King’s DNA without approval from a judge, ruling that King had “a sufficiently weighty and reasonable expectation of privacy against warrantless, suspicionless searches” under the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

The high court’s decision reverses that ruling and reinstates King’s rape conviction, which came after police took his DNA during an unrelated arrest.

Kennedy, who is often considered the court’s swing vote, wrote the decision along with conservative-leaning Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. They were joined by liberal-leaning Justice Stephen Breyer, while the dissenters were the conservative-leaning Scalia and liberal Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Kennedy called collecting DNA useful for police in identifying individuals.

“The use of DNA for identification is no different than matching an arrestee’s face to a wanted poster of a previously unidentified suspect, or matching tattoos to known gang symbols to reveal a criminal affiliation, or matching the arrestee’s fingerprints to those recovered from a crime scene,” Kennedy said. “DNA is another metric of identification used to connect the arrestee with his or her public persona, as reflected in records of his or her actions that are available to police.”

But the American Civil Liberties Union said the court’s ruling created “a gaping new exception to the Fourth Amendment.”

“The Fourth Amendment has long been understood to mean that the police cannot search for evidence of a crime — and all nine justices agreed that DNA testing is a search — without individualized suspicion,” said Steven R. Shapiro, the group’s legal director. “Today’s decision eliminates that crucial safeguard. At the same time, it’s important to recognize that other state laws on DNA testing are even broader than Maryland’s and may present issues that were not resolved by today’s ruling.”

Maryland’s DNA collection law only allows police to take DNA from those arrested for serious offenses such as murder, rape, assault, burglary and other crimes of violence. In his ruling, Kennedy did not say whether the court’s decision was limited to those crimes, but he did note that other states’ DNA collection laws differ from Maryland’s.

Scalia saw that as a crucial flaw. “If you believe that a DNA search will identify someone arrested for bank robbery, you must believe that it will identify someone arrested for running a red light,” he said.

Scott Berkowitz, president and founder of the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, cheered the decision and called DNA collection “a detective’s most valuable tool in solving rape cases.”

“We’re very pleased that the court recognized the importance of DNA and decided that, like fingerprints, it can be collected from arrestees without violating any privacy rights,” he said. “Out of every 100 rapes in this country, only three rapists will spend a day behind bars. To make matters worse, rapists tend to be serial criminals, so every one left on the streets is likely to commit still more attacks. DNA is a tool we could not afford to lose.”

Getting DNA swabs from criminals is common. All 50 states and the federal government take cheek swabs from convicted criminals to check against federal and state databanks, with the court’s blessing. The fight at the Supreme Court was over whether that DNA collection could come before conviction and without a judge issuing a warrant.

According to court documents, the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System or CODIS — a coordinated system of federal, state and local databases of DNA profiles — already contains more than 10 million criminal profiles and 1.1 million profiles of those arrested. According to the FBI, the DNA samples from people whose charges have been dismissed, who have been acquitted or against whom no charges have been brought are to be expunged from the federal system. But states and other municipalities that collect DNA make their own rules about what happens to their collections.

In the case before the court, a 53-year-old woman was raped and robbed but no one was arrested. Almost six years later, Alonzo King was arrested and charged with felony second-degree assault in a separate case. Relying on the Maryland law that allows warrantless DNA tests following some felony arrests, police took a cheek swab of King’s DNA, which matched a sample from the 2003 Salisbury rape. King was convicted of rape and sentenced to life in prison.

King eventually pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of misdemeanor assault from his arrest, a crime for which Maryland cannot take warrantless DNA samples. The state court said King’s rights therefore had been violated when the state took his DNA based on that arrest alone.

Maryland stopped collecting DNA after that decision, but Roberts allowed police to keep collecting DNA samples pending the high court’s review.

The case is Maryland v. King, 12-207.

The Very Real Danger of Genetically Modified Foods

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/01/the-very-real-danger-of-genetically-modified-foods/251051/

New research shows that when we eat we’re consuming more than just vitamins and protein. Our bodies are absorbing information, or microRNA.

Update 1/12: Thanks to science and biology bloggers, Christie Wilcox and Emily Willingham at the Scientific American blog network and The Biology Files, respectively, we’ve learned of the scientific inconsistencies made in Ari LeVaux’s most recent Flash in the Pan column, which is syndicated by a number of newspapers and magazine websites. This column has been expanded and updated for AlterNet, with LeVaux discussing specific improvements in the comments.

Chinese researchers have found small pieces of rice ribonucleic acid (RNA) in the blood and organs of humans who eat rice. The Nanjing University-based team showed that this genetic material will bind to receptors in human liver cells and influence the uptake of cholesterol from the blood.

The type of RNA in question is called microRNA (abbreviated to miRNA) due to its small size. MiRNAs have been studied extensively since their discovery ten years ago, and have been implicated as players in several human diseases including cancer, Alzheimer’s, and diabetes. They usually function by turning down or shutting down certain genes. The Chinese research provides the first in vivo example of ingested plant miRNA surviving digestion and influencing human cell function in this way.

Should the research survive scientific scrutiny — a serious hurdle — it could prove a game changer in many fields. It would mean that we’re eating not just vitamins, protein, and fuel, but gene regulators as well.

That knowledge could deepen our understanding of many fields, including cross-species communication, co-evolution, and predator-prey relationships. It could illuminate new mechanisms for some metabolic disorders and perhaps explain how some herbal and modern medicines function.

This study had nothing to do with genetically modified (GM) food, but it could have implications on that front. The work shows a pathway by which new food products, such as GM foods, could influence human health in previously unanticipated ways.

Monsanto‘s website states, “There is no need for, or value in testing the safety of GM foods in humans.” This viewpoint, while good for business, is built on an understanding of genetics circa 1960. It follows what’s called the “Central Dogma” of genetics, which postulates a one-way chain of command between DNA and the cells DNA governs.

The Central Dogma resembles the process of ordering a pizza. The DNA codes for the kind of pizza it wants, and orders it. The RNA is the order slip, which communicates the specifics of that pizza to the cook. The finished and delivered pizza is analogous to the protein that DNA codes for.

We’ve known for decades that the Central Dogma, though basically correct, is overly simplistic. For example: MiRNAs that don’t code for anything, pizza or otherwise, travel within cells silencing genes that are being expressed. So while one piece of DNA is ordering a pizza, it could also be bombarding the pizzeria with RNA signals that can cancel the delivery of other pizzas ordered by other bits of DNA.

Researchers have been using this phenomena to their advantage in the form of small, engineered RNA strands that are virtually identical to miRNA. In a technique called RNA interference, or RNA knockdown, these small bits of RNA are used to turn off, or “knock down,” certain genes.

RNA knockdown was first used commercially in 1994 to create the Flavor Savr, a tomato with increased shelf life. In 2007, several research teams began reporting success at engineering plant RNA to kill insect predators, by knocking down certain genes. As reported in MIT’s Technology Review on November 5, 2007, researchers in China used RNA knockdown to make:

…cotton plants that silence a gene that allows cotton bollworms to process the toxin gossypol, which occurs naturally in cotton. Bollworms that eat the genetically engineered cotton can’t make their toxin-processing proteins, and they die.

And:

Researchers at Monsanto and Devgen, a Belgian company, made corn plants that silence a gene essential for energy production in corn rootworms; ingestion wipes out the worms within 12 days.

Humans and insects have a lot in common, genetically. If miRNA can in fact survive the gut then it’s entirely possible that miRNA intended to influence insect gene regulation could also affect humans.

Monsanto’s claim that human toxicology tests are unwarranted is based on the doctrine of “substantial equivalence.” According to substantial equivalence, comparisons between GM and non-GM crops need only investigate the end products of DNA expression. New DNA is not considered a threat in any other way.

“So long as the introduced protein is determined to be safe, food from GM crops determined to be substantially equivalent is not expected to pose any health risks,” reads Monsanto’s website.

In other words, as long as the final product — the pizza, as it were — is non-toxic, the introduced DNA isn’t any different and doesn’t pose a problem. For what it’s worth, if that principle were applied to intellectual property law, many of Monsanto’s patents would probably be null and void.

Chen-Yu Zhang, the lead researcher on the Chinese RNA study, has made no comment regarding the implications of his work for the debate over the safety of GM food. Nonetheless, these discoveries help give shape to concerns about substantial equivalence that have been raised for years from within the scientific community.

In 1999, a group of scientists wrote a letter titled “Beyond Substantial Equivalence” to the prestigious journal Nature. In the letter, Erik Millstone et. al. called substantial equivalence “a pseudo-scientific concept” that is “inherently anti-scientific because it was created primarily to provide an excuse for not requiring biochemical or toxicological tests.”

To these charges, Monsanto responded: “The concept of substantial equivalence was elaborated by international scientific and regulatory experts convened by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 1991, well before any biotechnology products were ready for market.”

This response is less a rebuttal than a testimonial to Monsanto’s prowess at handling regulatory affairs. Of course the term was established before any products were ready for the market. Doing so was a prerequisite to the global commercialization of GM crops. It created a legal framework for selling GM foods anywhere in the world that substantial equivalence was accepted. By the time substantial equivalence was adopted, Monsanto had already developed numerous GM crops and was actively grooming them for market.

The OECD’s 34 member nations could be described as largely rich, white, developed, and sympathetic to big business. The group’s current mission is to spread economic development to the rest of the world. And while the mission has yet to be accomplished, OECD has helped Monsanto spread substantial equivalence globally.

Many GM fans will point out that if we do toxicity tests on GM foods, we should also have to do toxicity testing on every other kind of food in the world.

But we’ve already done the testing on the existing plants. We tested them the hard way, by eating strange things and dying, or almost dying, over thousands of years. That’s how we’ve figured out which plants are poisonous. And over the course of each of our lifetimes we’ve learned which foods we’re allergic to.

All of the non-GM breeds and hybrid species that we eat have been shaped by the genetic variability offered by parents whose genes were similar enough that they could mate, graft, or test tube baby their way to an offspring that resembled them.

A tomato with fish genes? Not so much. That, to me, is a new plant and it should be tested. We shouldn’t have to figure out if it’s poisonous or allergenic the old fashioned way, especially in light of how new-fangled the science is.

It’s time to re-write the rules to acknowledge how much more complicated genetic systems are than the legal regulations — and the corporations that have written them — give credit.

Monsanto isn’t doing itself any PR favors by claiming “no need for, or value in testing the safety of GM foods in humans.” Admittedly, such testing can be difficult to construct — who really wants to volunteer to eat a bunch of GM corn just to see what happens? At the same time, if companies like Monsanto want to use processes like RNA interference to make plants that can kill insects via genetic pathways that might resemble our own, some kind of testing has to happen.

A good place to start would be the testing of introduced DNA for other effects — miRNA-mediated or otherwise — beyond the specific proteins they code for. But the status quo, according to Monsanto’s website, is:

There is no need to test the safety of DNA introduced into GM crops. DNA (and resulting RNA) is present in almost all foods. DNA is non-toxic and the presence of DNA, in and of itself, presents no hazard.

Given what we know, that stance is arrogant. Time will tell if it’s reckless.

There are computational methods of investigating whether unintended RNAs are likely to be knocking down any human genes. But thanks to this position, the best we can do is hope they’re using them. Given it’s opposition to the labeling of GM foods as well, it seems clear that Monsanto wants you to close your eyes, open your mouth, and swallow.

It’s time for Monsanto to acknowledge that there’s more to DNA than the proteins it codes for — even if it’s for no other reason than the fact that RNA alone is a lot more complicated that Watson and Crick could ever have imagined.

Irish potato famine pathogen identified

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22596561

Scientists have used plant samples collected in the mid-19th Century to identify the pathogen that caused the Irish potato famine.

 

A plant pest that causes potato blight spread to Ireland in 1845 triggering a famine that killed one million people.

 

DNA extracted from museum specimens shows the strain that changed history is different from modern day epidemics, and is probably now extinct.

 

Other strains continue to attack potato and tomato crops around the world.

 

The fungus-like infection causes annual losses of enough potatoes to feed hundreds of millions of people a year.

 

A team led by The Sainsbury Laboratory, Norwich, traced the global spread of potato blight from the early 1800s to the present day.

 

Until now, it has been unclear how early strains of Phytophthora infestans are related to those present in the world today.

The Irish Potato Famine

• Altogether, about a million people in Ireland are estimated to have died of starvation and epidemic disease between 1846 and 1851
• Some two million emigrated in a period of a little more than a decade from 1845
• Comparison with other famines suggests the Irish famine of the late 1840s, which killed nearly one-eighth of the entire population, was proportionally much more destructive of human life than the vast majority of famines in modern times

Source: BBC History

 

Researchers in the UK, Germany and the US analysed dried leaves kept in collections in museums at Kew Royal Botanical Gardens, UK, and Botanische Staatssammlung Munchen, Germany.

 

High-tech DNA sequencing techniques allowed them to decode ancient DNA from the pathogen in samples stored as early as 1845.

 

These were compared with modern-day genetic types from Europe, Africa and the Americas, giving an insight into the evolution of the pathogen.

 

“This strain was different from all the modern strains that we analysed – most likely it is new to science,” Prof Sophien Kamoun of The Sainsbury Laboratory told BBC News.

 

“We can’t be sure but most likely it’s gone extinct.”

Treasures of knowledge

The researchers believe the strain – HERB-1 – emerged in the early 1800s and continued to spread globally throughout the 19th Century.

 

Only in the 20th Century, after new potato varieties were introduced, was it replaced by another Phytophthora infestans strain, US-1, which is now dominant around the world.

 

Potato blight is a major problem today

 

The research, published in the new open-access scientific journal, eLife, suggests crop breeding methods may have an impact on the evolution of pathogens.

 

“Perhaps this strain became extinct when the first resistant potato varieties were bred at the beginning of the 20th Century,” said Kentaro Yoshida from The Sainsbury Laboratory.

 

“What is certain is that these findings will greatly help us to understand the dynamics of emerging pathogens. This type of work paves the way for the discovery of many more treasures of knowledge hidden in herbaria.”

 

Commenting on the study, Professor Sir David Baulcombe of the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge said it shows how we can use herb specimens to track biodiversity.

 

“It might be a revival in the fortunes or relevance of dried plants,” he said. “It illustrates very nicely the arms race over pathogens and their host.”

 

Phytophthora infestans – which causes potato blight – emerged in the US in 1844, and spread to Europe the following year.

 

The summer of 1845 was mild but very wet in the UK and Ireland, giving the perfect conditions for the blight to spread.

 

The failure of the crop in Ireland – which relied heavily on potatoes as a food source – led to the deaths of about a million people from starvation and disease between 1846 and 1851.

Search for John Wayne Gacy victims solves decades-old missing person case

http://news.ca.msn.com/top-stories/search-for-john-wayne-gacy-victims-solves-decades-old-missing-person-case

A DNA test used by investigators to identify victims of serial killer John Wayne Gacy has helped solve a 41-year-old New Jersey missing persons case, officials announced Tuesday.

Sixteen-year-old Steven Soden went missing on April 3, 1972, but his remains were not identified until 2012, when authorities matched them with a DNA sample from his sister.

Soden’s relatives contacted the Cook County Sheriff’s Office in 2011 after hearing about Sheriff Thomas Dart’s efforts to identify several of Gacy’s victims. They believed Soden may be one of them, officials said.

“We always had hopes that we’d somehow find him alive,” Steven’s brother, Ron Soden, 73, told NBC 4 New York Tuesday from his home in Tacoma, Wash. “In this day and age, it’s so much easier to find someone over the Internet.”

The teen, who lived at an orphanage, was last seen alive on April 3, 1972, running away with 12-year-old Donald Caldwell, from the Bass River Camp Grounds in Burlington County, N.J., during a group camping trip, officials said. Neither boy was ever seen again.

Soden may have headed to Chicago, where his biological father lived, his relatives suggested — and there he may have come into contact with Gacy.

Gacy killed 33 teenage boys and young men in Chicago from 1972 to 1978. He was executed for his crimes in 1994. Seven of his victims remain unidentified.

At Dart’s request, a DNA sample was taken from Soden’s sister, but there was no match between her and any of the unidentified Gacy victims.

In December 2012, however, her profile matched that of unidentified human skeletal remains found 13 years earlier in New Jersey.

Over the next few months, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office and New Jersey State Police conducted further investigation and obtained additional DNA samples from Soden’s half siblings, including a paternal half sibling, to make an accurate identification.

Genetic testing was performed at the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification.

The remains were discovered in the woods in Burlington County in April 2000 — not far from where Soden was last seen.

New Jersey State Police say they’re still searching for Caldwell as well as additional evidence in Soden’s death, according to Philadelphia NBC affiliate WCAU. His exact cause of death is still unknown.

“You always hope for the best,” Ron Soden told NBC 4 New York. “But when you finally get an answer, a partial answer…” He trailed off.

“It’s sad,” he continued. “The sense of him being so young, and the way it happened, and where it was. He probably ran away because he thought nobody cared about him. It’s just not a good story.”

Fake Fish On Shelves And Restaurant Tables Across USA, New Study Says

http://www.forbes.com/sites/larryolmsted/2013/02/21/fake-fish-on-shelves-and-restaurant-tables-across-usa-new-study-says/

Back in December I wrote here about the widespread substitution of cheaper species of fish for more expensive and desirable ones, a daily bait and switch that routinely goes on at retail fish markets, in restaurants and especially in sushi places.

It’s gotten much worse.

Not only is Asian pangasius (or ponga) frequently passed off as everything from catfish to sole to flounder to grouper, and not only is premium red snapper hardly ever actual red snapper, but farmed fish like salmon is often sold as “wild caught.” Many choose wild caught for perceived health and sustainably reasons, so fish fraud goes beyond taste into actual endangerment. In fact as a new study today revels, there are much more serious health risks associated with this widespread fraud.

In my last piece I cited studies in specific big cities including New York, LA, Miami and Boston. In New York, students did DNA testing of purchased sushi and retail samples and found that among other things, 78% of red snapper was a far cry from red snapper. In December, non-profit ocean conservation group Oceana had released a report titled “Widespread Seafood Fraud Found in New York City.” Their more extensive study found that 39% of Big Apple restaurants and retail fish sellers committed fraud, as did every single one (100%) of the 16 sushi restaurants tested. Boston and LA fared even worse, with fake fish rates of 48% and 55% respectively.

Well, today Oceana is back with a new much broader nationwide survey – and the results are terrifying.

Their study “uncovered widespread seafood fraud across the United States…  In one of the largest seafood fraud investigations in the world to date, DNA testing confirmed that one-third, or 33 percent, of the 1,215 fish samples collected by Oceana from 674 retail outlets in 21 states were mislabeled, according to U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidelines.”

Once again Los Angelinos had the most concern: “Oceana found seafood fraud everywhere it tested, including mislabeling rates of 52 percent in Southern California, 49 percent in Austin and Houston, 48 percent in Boston (including testing by The Boston Globe), 39 percent in New York City, 38 percent in Northern California and South Florida, 36 percent in Denver, 35 percent in Kansas City (MO/KS), 32 percent in Chicago, 26 percent in Washington, D.C., 21 percent in Portland (OR) and 18 percent in Seattle.”

These are just a few of the most disturbing highlights from the study:

– More than half (59%) of the 46 fish types tested had mislabeling.

– Only 7 of 120 red snapper samples (6%!) collected nationwide were actually red snapper.

– 84% of white tuna samples were actually escolar, “a species that can cause serious digestive issues for some individuals who eat more than a few ounces.”

– Fish on the FDA’s “DO NOT EAT” list for sensitive groups such as pregnant women and children because of their high mercury content were sold to customers who had ordered safer fish.

– Cheaper farmed fish were substituted for wild: pangasius sold as grouper, sole, and cod, tilapia sold as red snapper and Atlantic farmed salmon sold as wild or king salmon.

– Overfished and vulnerable species were substituted for more sustainable catch.

How can this all be happening in our first world country with all our regulations and labeling and government oversight?

As I explained in my multi-part series on Kobe and Wagyu beef, mislabeling of food is practically a national pastime in this country and regulations are often intentionally lax, lax by government and lobbyist design, rather than by omission. In my first Kobe beef report I explained how what is widely labeled Kobe beef on menus across the country, from burgers to $150 steaks, was never, ever actual Kobe beef, not once. Later I explained how import regulations changed allowing very small amounts of Japanese beef (but not from Kobe) to be imported, yet the vast majority of retailers and restaurants claiming to sell Japanese beef – at any price – are lying. I also discussed labeling scams in everything from Champagne to Port wine to Extra Virgin Olive Oil. By some informed estimates, only 2% of what is sold in this country as EVOO actually is, and is some cases, consumers are lucky if their “olive oil:” is made mostly from olives. I most recently looked at the oft counterfeited “King of Cheeses,” Parmigiano-Reggiano, and why it is imperative that consumers seek out and make sure they are buying the real thing. Even the nation’s best cheese stores routinely sell fake versions next to the good stuff.

Unfortunately our food system is geared to mislead consumers, often dangerously; on a daily basis and many of thirties we think we are buying and eating are anything but what we expect. To see the complete results of Oceana’s latest survey (as a PDF), click here.