Family tree DNA data crack cold cases
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 31 May 2021
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the US - but increasingly in other countries too - cold case murder, sexual assaults, and unidentified person cases once thought unsolvable are being cracked thanks to the proliferation of public genetic databases. But with this success come deep worries for our DNA data. Ivana Davidovic talks to Brett Williams, the CEO of Verogen - the owner of GEDMatch consumer DNA database - about their business decision to cooperate with the police, privacy concerns and new opportunities opening up in countries like Mexico and Vietnam. We also hear from Tina Franke, whose daughter Christine Franke was murdered in Florida in 2001. She speaks of her relief at the unexpected progress in the investigation after almost two decades. Professor Andrew MacLeod tells us about his project - in conjunction with King's College London - to harness forensic genealogy to identify perpetrators of sexual violence in the aid industry. And law professor Natalie Ram explains the pioneering legislation being brought in the US state of Maryland designed to regulate the industry much more tightly.
PHOTO: Forensic scientist collecting evidence/Getty Images
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily with me, Ivana Davidovich. In today's program, the growing |
| 0:06.5 | industry of forensic genealogy. Would you upload your DNA to a commercial genealogy database |
| 0:12.4 | to find out more about your family tree? But what if you could incriminate your family members? |
| 0:17.5 | If your daughter is laying dead because somebody killed her, I don't care. You use |
| 0:24.7 | what you can use. I think it's a very good thing that they can find and solve crimes that are |
| 0:31.0 | years and years old. In the U.S., cooperation between consumer DNA databases and the police |
| 0:37.1 | has led to unexpected breakthroughs |
| 0:39.4 | in cold cases, but is our privacy being compromised? |
| 0:43.6 | You've got an absolute right to privacy. It's one of the tenements of our society, |
| 0:47.6 | but you also have an absolute right not to get murdered and raped. What privacy rights am I |
| 0:52.2 | comfortable giving up to know that I've got an increased level of safety in my society? |
| 0:57.2 | That's all in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 1:02.2 | We all went to Orlando to find that there was crime scene tape all over the apartment parking lot. |
| 1:11.7 | We couldn't get anywhere near. |
| 1:13.6 | I guess reality came crushing down on us. |
| 1:16.8 | It was just, it's nothing we ever expected. |
| 1:20.6 | You know, we're just normal people. |
| 1:22.3 | These things happen in the newspaper. |
| 1:24.3 | You hear about them, but they don't happen to you. |
| 1:28.0 | Tina Franke will never forget 21st of October 2001. |
| 1:32.4 | Barely a month after 9-11, her daughter Christine Franke was murdered. |
| 1:37.2 | Christine was studying in Florida to be a schoolteacher. |
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