We’re going to begin tonight in California where police believe they have solved one of the nation’s enduring mysteries. They announced an arrest in the case of the Golden State Killer. DNA evidence led them to one of the country’s most notorious serial killers.
“Joseph James D’Angelo was arrested yesterday. We’ve solved the case of the century.”
April 24th, 2018. The deadliest American murderer of the 20th century is arrested, and as you can see, investigators are still pouring through this home here, looking for evidence. The serial killer who had been on the run for almost 40 years was living quietly in the suburbs of Sacramento.
“Defense attorneys, everybody is gone, sorry, in custody, D’Angelo, Joseph James D’Angelo, you’re before the Sacramento Security Force for two reasons, a total of 51 rapes and 13 violent murders.”
In the 1980s, this man terrorized California, caused gun sales to skyrocket, and tormented generations of police officers.
“And I am really sorry, no one had ever been able to identify him until a police officer had a brilliant idea to track him down, digging into the genetic data of millions of Americans, an innovative technique which combines big data and traditional genealogy, genetic genealogy.”
Think about this: it’s the Golden State Killer case, for 44 years, 15 different law enforcement jurisdictions. With the genealogy tool, it took six of us 4 and a half months. Thanks to this technique, a so-called cold case is solved every week in the United States.
“The hiding places are taken away, they’re… they can no longer hide and do their horrible deeds because we will find them, and they have to know that around the world we have technology and science at our disposal.”
Thanks to huge DNA databases which already include millions of Americans and Europeans, it would be possible to find anyone on the planet. How far can this widescale use of DNA data take us? If we can track killers, we could also track political dissident, migrants, family relatives, or even yourself. This is not science fiction; this is the world that we can very clearly see coming in the near term. What must we sacrifice to make the world a safer place? Our freedom, our privacy? Is the end of criminal activity worth it?
In the United States, one killer after another is being tracked down. The American police have become masters of DNA identification. Paul Holes was the first one to try it. He has spent his entire career searching for the Golden State Killer, the dreaded Californian serial killer.
“He was a predator that was very sophisticated, highly intelligent, employed tactics that most, you know, serial rapists or serial killers don’t employ.”
“It’s the second known attack by the East Area Rapist here in Modesto and it occurred in the northeast part of the city, less than 3 miles from the site of the previous incident. This time it was a 15-year-old girl again. It was in a northeast Sacramento neighborhood again. He knew she was alone, forced his way in using a knife to threaten her and raped her repeatedly for several hours.”
“The 39th attack of the East Area Rapist took place in this very nice middle-class neighborhood. This time we have a list of 13 homicide victims, 50 known attacks that he committed between June 1976 and July 1979 up in Northern California, so this was a very prolific offender.”
“This was a man that was willing to go inside house in the middle of the night, and he stand away from the bed but wake the couple up, and he’s shining a flashlight in their eyes so they can’t see him at all, and he’s telling them I’ve got a gun. Often taking shoelaces out of the couple’s own shoes in their closet and adding more bindings to the man. Go through the house and come back with dishes or similar kind of trinkets that he would stack on the man’s back, and basically tell the man, ‘If I hear these rattle, she’s dead, or I’ll cut a part of her off and bring it to you, or I’ll kill everything in the house.’ If there were kids present, then he would separate the woman out to the family room where he would sexually assault her.”
“You could be a highly trained military guy, but this guy sneaks into your bedroom and has a gun pointed at you and you realize, you know, even if I try to make a move he’s going to shoot me.”
And unfortunately, down in Southern California, some of the men did try to go after him and they were shot and killed. But once he starts attacking and once law enforcement realizes we’ve got a new and very dangerous rapist out there, they start forming task forces in Sacramento, they do proactive patrol, there’s helicopters flying overhead, they’re trying to catch this guy with everything they possibly can. And yet East Area Rapist was still able to attack in those very areas where law enforcement is trying to catch him and escape and get away.
“He’s not the man. If there’s more than one, we’ve still got a lot of work to do.”
These communities to completely change their lifestyle. The communities are forming neighborhood watches where now you have groups of men who are wandering around the neighborhoods at night trying to do their own patrol to augment what law enforcement was doing. They are buying guns and so now everybody was paranoid. In 1986, the attack stopped. The killer seemed to have settled down. But Paul Holes didn’t give up.
“At the time that I was working the case, the case became a passion and it was a personal passion, and I absolutely was wanting to solve it before I ended my career. And you know, it was just this roller coaster ride of emotions. You know, one guy I spent two years looking for and then I eliminated him. I was like, ‘I just wasted two years of my life.’ And then another… you know, each guy I spent so much time, and at towards the end I thought, ‘I’m not going to do it, I’m not going to solve this case.'”
“Because of my background, you know, having been a scientist, having worked as a DNA analyst, I thought I had done everything possible with the technologies until I ran across, coincidentally, a genealogist by the name of Barbara Rae-Venter.”
Since the killer is not in police databases, Paul Holes and his genealogist partner decide to search for him through members of his family. They search through huge databases used by millions of Americans who are passionate about genealogy or curious about their origins.
“We have no idea who we’re related to. Oh my god, this is home. Wow, I just didn’t know they kept records like this to be honest with you. Oh my god, and let Ancestry guide you through the world’s largest online collection of family history records.”
In 2018, these DNA kits are becoming very popular. Nearly 30 million people have already sent some of their saliva to laboratories to obtain information on their genetic profile for $100, their geographical origins and, above all, the names and email addresses of cousins, closely or distantly related, who share some DNA and who are already in the database.
In March 2018, 4 months before his retirement, Paul Holes tried this last trick. He decides to send a DNA sample from the Golden State Killer to one of these labs. No police officer before him has ever done that.
“We don’t have his saliva, we have his semen, and there are some complexities. I had consumed all my Golden State Killer DNA, you know, and I was fortunate there was one that was still left in the coroner’s evidence room that had never been touched.”
This is Paul Holes’ last chance. He slips the killer’s DNA sample into the test tube and sends the kit to the lab. Two weeks later, he receives the results.
“Now I have a list of relatives. Now they were distant relatives, but this was huge, you know. I was like tingling, going, ‘Okay, I’ve got people now that I can work from to identify this killer.’ Um, so it was… it was exciting and I was just thinking, ‘Oh, you know, we’ll be able to do this now real quick.’ Did I didn’t realize how hard it was going to be. It took us roughly about 4 months.”
“Nobody else had done it at that point, so we were learning as we were going.”
“Fundamentally we get down into… oh now I’ve got, you know, some men that are the right age living in California at the right time where the attacks are occurring, and this is just investigation 101.”
“I am looking at the guy’s driver’s license or his criminal history, and it’d be, ‘Oh this guy’s 6’3″, he’s not the Golden State Killer.’ I am now within two weeks of my retirement, and that’s when Joseph D’Angelo is the last person on our list that we haven’t eliminated yet, and I was skeptical about him as being the guy that we were looking for.”
So the last day before I had to turn my badge and gun in and turn my FBI credentials in, I drove up to go take a look at where D’Angelo was living. I pulled in front of his house and he was home, and I’m… I’m looking at the house. I’m backing up looking at his backyard, I’m hoping to see him, and I never do see him. And I thought about it, going, ‘What’s the likelihood this is the Golden State Killer?’ I just thought, ‘I better be careful,’ and that’s when I just decided, ‘You know what, I need to drive home and not rush this.’ And that… that was the last thing I did. The next day, I’m turning my badge and gun in and I’m walking out of my office carrying a little cardboard box with my, you know, my… my momentos for my career basically.”
Sacramento Sheriff and FBI puts D’Angelo under surveillance. He drives to a local store, gets out and goes into the store, and an undercover officer goes and swabs his car door handle. That gets sent to the lab.
“I get a call from the lieutenant of the Sacramento DA’s office. As soon as I get on the phone, he’s, ‘Paul, you can’t tell anybody.’ And I knew something was up, and he said, ‘I don’t know exactly what it means, but the lab’s super excited.’ You know, he says, ‘D’Angelo match crossed, you know, 21 markers.’ And I was… I told Kirk, ‘It’s him.'”
“You know, there… there is that that moment of just being stunned, you know, after at this point I had been involved in the case for 24 years.”
“He’s now convicted and in prison. Paul Holes, welcome to honestly…”
The day after the arrest, Paul Holes became a legend, a super cop who was invited to every talk show in the country.
“Investigator who worked on the Golden State Killer case for the last 24 years. The tool is revolutionary, it’s powerful and it enhances public safety.”
Since Paul Holes’ stroke of genius, in 3 years, nearly 300 killers have been put in jail using this method. In the United States, a new type of private detective has appeared: the DNA detective. The most famous of them is Cece Moore. She invented the genetic genealogy technique they use.
“Please welcome Cece.”
“Hi.”
A former actress, the detective is very popular, invited to the biggest shows in the country to talk about her achievements. There is even a series dedicated to her.
“The perfect crime doesn’t exist anymore if you leave your DNA behind. So anyone who has left their DNA behind at a crime scene should plan on being identified. It might be next week, it might be next year, it might take a little bit more time, but there is no doubt that they will be identified.”
“There are over 160 cases now that I’ve been able to help law enforcement resolve and it averages to about one per week.”
In 2008, Cece Moore’s interest in genealogy rose just as the first DNA analysis kits appeared. Her hobby quickly became an obsession. She gave up her acting career and compared hundreds of DNA profiles. After 7 years of research alone at home without a diploma, she developed a new and extremely efficient technique to identify unknown people. She voluntarily tracked down hundreds of relatives of adopted people. Paul Holes was inspired by her method to find the Golden State Killer.
“I did invent a new job without intending to. I certainly didn’t set out to do that. But when I dropped my current work to focus on this as a volunteer at first, I couldn’t have imagined where it would go, you know?”
“Came as quite a shock to forensic experts, forensic scientists, that this is their career or their degree, they’re, you know, certified, licensed, and then out of nowhere comes this genetic genealogy technique they’d never heard of.”
Cece created the first genetic genealogy service in the world within a large American laboratory. After Paul Holes, hundreds of police officers called Cece to solve their crimes. One of the first is an investigator from Indiana. In May 2018, he asked her to look into the case of April Tinsley, an 8-year-old girl who was murdered and raped 500 meters from her home. It is one of the most famous 31-year-old cold cases in the United States. It took Cece Moore 4 days to solve it.
“I Googled Cece Moore, I saw some of the projects she was involved with and I thought to myself, ‘How in the world is she going to track one person in the whole world using this information?’ I… I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. I even went so far as to go to the local bookstore and buy a book called ‘DNA for Dummies’ and another one called ‘Genealogy for Dummies’ because they were talking about things that I had never heard of before.”
“I log into the website and I run the kit number and I see that there are matches.”
“The match list is really exciting. There are no really close relatives, but there are third cousins of April’s killer. If you share DNA, you have to have a common ancestor in your family tree. Some people use aliases; they might use ‘butterfly 45,’ and I have to identify them and then figure out who their parents are and grandparents. Because my goal is just to find the commonalities or the common ancestors, so I’m building trees for hours and hours and hours.”
“I use genealogical records like census records, vital records, birth, marriage, death records. But I also use newspaper archives. I use social media; you know, a lot of people put information about their families on social media and that’s really helpful to me. So I have to be creative.”
“On April’s case, I really didn’t want to stop. I just wanted to keep going going going going. I’ve been building trees for three, 4 days, pretty much non-stop just with little maps, and, um, my husband puts food in front of me so I don’t have to stop. So I don’t take breaks, I just keep working and working because my job is reliant on finding the smallest clues. I have to be able to recognize patterns and commonalities and overlaps. I have to know, ‘Hey, I saw that surname 12 hours ago,’ and so I can’t have a lot of distractions.”
Starting from a common ancestry, Cece does reverse genealogy. Instead of looking for ancestors, she goes back down the tree to find the common descendant of the great-grandparents.
“After maybe two days, I’ve finally found that first connection where two different descendants from genetic networks marry and have children. So I know that the killer’s got to be a descendant of that marriage. So I know that I am very, very close to identifying April’s killer.”
“I learned that they had three sons. One of the three brothers died before the crime took place, so that narrows it down to just two men, just two men who could be responsible for April’s murder. And at that point my job ends. I then have to provide that information to Detective Martin and his team.”
That is when Detective Martin and his team hear the name of the killer for the very first time.
“Does he? Yeah. Interesting. So, one of the… one of the surprise, one of the big ones.”
“It was the biggest gift in the world and is… it was exciting, it was scary, it was… it was a very overwhelming moment. We now, for lack of better terms, have the most scientific tip in the world.”
“John Miller was identified as the primary suspect because we found in our database where he had had some run-ins with law enforcement, where he was making rude and sexual comments to ladies and children in parking lots of supermarkets and grocery stores.”
“We set surveillance immediately. We never had a point where we weren’t watching him.”
“So that’s always difficult. That’s… it’s hard because no matter how confident I am, I always have some doubts. I always second-guess myself, I always go back to the trees and I re-verify my conclusions. I think, ‘Could I have made a mistake?'”
The police officer takes a can and some leftover food from the suspect’s trash and sends it to the lab for analysis. Eight hours later, the lab result comes back.
“It was John. The same genes and the same DNA. Before he could go in his house, myself and my partner approached John and said, ‘John, we need to talk to you.’ And John looked at us and said, ‘Okay.’ And I was shocked. I figured he’d ask a thousand questions. John didn’t ask why. John didn’t ask why we needed to talk to him or what we wanted help with. Until I said to John in an interview room, ‘Hey, um, do you have any idea what we’re need to talk to you about?'”
“I think probably the Tinsley case. That’s the only one I can think of. Yeah, yeah, you’re right.”
John Miller ultimately pleaded guilty to the murder of April Marie Tinsley because he had no choice.
“John did that because this technology is so strong. I don’t need everyone’s DNA. I really just need a very small percentage of the population. It’s somewhere between about 1 and 3% of the population that would be enough to solve many of the cold cases.”
3% of DNA profiles would be enough to find anyone on the planet. This crucial stage has already been reached in the United States and in China. In Europe, it is only a matter of months. The science of genetic identification is progressing so fast that it is starting to overtake conventional investigation. Scientist offers police the possibility of editing genetic robot portraits of their suspects—a business that appears to have come straight out of a sci-fi movie.
“We went to all of these conferences to meet detectives, to meet police chiefs, and tell them, ‘If you have DNA from a crime scene, we can tell you what your person looked like.’ And most of them said, ‘No, you can’t. That… that’s not real, it’s science fiction.’ And it took a long time for us to convince people that this was really possible and that it was possible with the DNA from their case.”
“So what we do is we look at the DNA from a crime scene. So DNA is a molecule, and there are different parts of it with different codes. So what we’re interested in is, what does this look like right here? And if we look at that and it’s a certain way—let’s say it’s an ‘A-A’—well, that tells us that this person probably has brown eyes. But if we look at it and it’s ‘G-G,’ well then that person probably has blue eyes.”
“But eye color is a lot easier than other traits. But for more complicated traits, let’s say we want to know how long that person’s chin is, we need to look not just at one place, but at hundreds or thousands. We need to know what is it… what does this person’s DNA look like here, here, here, here. And that’s all just to tell how long their chin is. But that’s the thing, in DNA there are three billion pieces of information.”
“There are other aspects of the DNA, not the sequence, but changes to it that can tell approximately how old someone is. And so there’s been a lot of research in that, and they’ve been able to get it down to sort of like plus or minus 3 to 4 years.”
From a tiny DNA trace, even a damaged or partial one, in less than 24 hours, the software produces a face with chilling precision. In 2016, in Texas, the body of Shante Blankenship, 25 years old, was found in a shed. The young woman had been raped and beaten to death.
“You know, the detectives were looking for leads because they didn’t have a witness to this crime. And so we analyzed the DNA, and the first thing we found was that this is a person with fair skin. And then again, we had this person’s prediction—this is our unknown person, but now we know he probably has blue eyes, and he almost certainly does not have dark eyes. You know, there’s some very small possibility that he has hazel eyes, but if there were anyone on that suspect list with brown eyes, they could be eliminated with 99.9% confidence. And we found that this was probably a person who had a few freckles, and they almost certainly didn’t have no freckles. This person falls sort of between blonde and brown, so a light brown, a dirty blonde. And then for redness, we predict this person does not have red hair.”
“Finally, we can put all of that together. So what you see here is the actual prediction that comes out of Snapshot. You see that it’s a three-dimensional face shape. The jaw of this person is wider than average, more compact chin, and the nose is sort of up.”
The police officer publishes the wanted notice in the media and in public spaces.
“The perpetrator himself saw this, and he saw, and he realized that the police were going to find him soon, and so he decided to confess. So he went before his church congregation and confessed that he was the one who had murdered Shantal Blankenship.”
In the United States, there are no regulations on software-modeled DNA portraits. In France, its use is limited and subject to judicial review. It has only been used in rare cases, and the results have never been made public. However, the use of DNA profiling by the American police has become standard practice. But does DNA protect against judicial errors? Can it be the solution to all mysteries?
“We want a new trial! We had a Central Park 5, we will not have a Howard Beach one with Chanel Lewis! No justice, no peace! No justice, no peace! No justice, no peace!”
New York City, summer 2021. Hundreds of protesters claim the innocence of a man charged as a result of DNA profiling. Chanel Lewis, aged 20, sentenced to life in prison for the murder of a jogger. 40,000 people sign a petition asking for a retrial. The investigation and the trial are resounding against a backdrop of racial tensions. The victim, a white female, is the daughter of a New York police officer. The accused is a black man from a low-income neighborhood and without an education. It is a case that has captivated New York for the last 5 years.
“And anyone who follows crime in this city, um, and it’s a case where that many, many people have serious questions about. And so you have massive media outcry about how this could happen.”
Hundreds of detectives are placed on a task force designed to solve the murder. The pressure on the NYPD to solve the murder, who did this, why they did it, why it was so gruesome, is extreme and building over time. The longer the case is cold, the longer they cannot say that they’ve made an arrest. And for 6 months, the case is cold.
Ria Teddi is Chanel Lewis’s lawyer. According to her, the young man was put in prison on the basis of a false DNA trail.
“Multiple DNA deposits were found on the body of Karina Vetrano. Only one rose to the threshold required to create an actual profile of a donor that ultimately came to be known as ‘male donor one.’ The other DNA deposits on Karina Vetrano’s body were too insignificant to generate a DNA profile.”
According to law enforcement, multiple traces of DNA were found on Karina Vetrano’s hands, face, and clothes. Analysis of the male number one sample indicated that this DNA came from a black male not listed in police files. The police then proceeded to take samples from 500 black men in the neighborhood without success. However, from the beginning of the investigation, testimonies indicated the presence of two white men in suits at the crime scene.
“The NYPD set aside any suspicion they had about two jacked-up white guys, any suspicion they may have had about any other population, and focused singularly on black men based solely on a conclusion from DNA.”
Lieutenant Russo of the New York City Police Department claims that 6 months after Karina Vetrano is killed, he is sitting in his office and happens to remember that 7 or 8 months prior, he’s driving home in Howard Beach and he sees a young African-American man wearing a sweat suit on a hot day. And because of the apparent suspicion of that—it’s not a crime, Chanel wasn’t doing anything—inspires Lieutenant Russo to get his name, get his address. They don’t make an arrest, they have no basis upon which to make an arrest, but they get his information. Lieutenant Russo claims that 6 months after Karina Vetrano was killed, he remembered that interaction, feels a gut suspicion that the young man they stopped and spoke to had something to do with her disappearance, her death. Sends a detective squad to the door of that young man to request a DNA sample on consent. And just like that, it hit.
The lawyer claims her client’s innocence. She asks that the case be reopened and that Lewis Chanel be retried.
“It’s extremely disturbing that no one in this case has seriously considered whether or not male donor 1’s DNA was left on Karina Vetrano’s body by way of some event other than her killing, which is to say, did she sit on a bench that he had previously sat on? Did they happen to patronize the same restaurant in Howard Beach? DNA doesn’t survive forever, it also doesn’t diminish immediately. I ride a subway four times a day, the subway system moves 8 million people a day. The amount of genetic transfer happening solely on the New York City subway is unfathomable. And if you were to lead to the conclusion that simply because of the presence of someone else’s DNA on a person’s body that those people were in a criminal interaction—a victim-perpetrator interaction—has incredible power to lead to the imprisonment of innocent people.”
Finding a person in a matter of days and making them a criminal using DNA identification—this is the immense power that police and governments now have. Very recently, rights activists have seen a terrifying variation of this method appear. The notion of crime can evolve according to time and place. For the past 5 years, a dozen states in the United States have put in place rules limiting access to abortion. For having an abortion, millions of women or their relatives are likely to be criminalized.
“There have been hundreds of thousands of people that haven’t had real access to abortion. The right to abortion has been kind of sliced away. Imagine that it’s a pie, and every year with every law they take a slice out, and now we’re left with this sliver, and we’re trying to hold on to it with our bare hands to say, ‘No, not this too.'”
“We know of at least 1,200 people that have been prosecuted, criminalized for a pregnancy loss, I believe since Roe in 1973. That case, Roe to now. There was a 2018 or 2019 case in Augusta, Georgia where they found a 20-week-old fetal remains, fetus in a water treatment plant.”
“The Augusta police analyzed the DNA of the fetus and within two days the mother is found and questioned.”
“The prosecutor in that case said, ‘You know, our goal is to reunite this fetus with its mother. We’re trying to find the mother to see if she’s okay, to see if she’s bleeding out.’ But the reality is, once you start doing DNA testing, you’re not getting the results back in a turnaround that’s going to save a person that’s bleeding out. Really, the goal is about criminalization, because the assumption was that a crime had been committed—that if there is a pregnancy loss, something must have gone wrong, someone must have done something wrong.”
Facing a scandal triggered by this arrest, the prosecutor has withdrawn the charges against the young woman. However, since then, in Virginia in 2019 or in Texas in the autumn of 2021, other women have been found with DNA genealogy. In both cases, the circumstances of the end of the pregnancy are not clear.
“Abortion is criminalized, and at times because abortion is criminalized, not just people that intend to have a pregnancy loss are arrested and prosecuted. It could be someone that had a stillbirth at home and it’s an assumption or that it’s an abortion. And those people with unintended losses are kind of like wrapped up in those abortion criminalization. The fear, and the genuine fear is this chilling effect of people that might not go to their doctors because they don’t want to go to jail. We incarcerate more people in the United States than anywhere else, right? So we know that the likelihood of police and prosecutors and state actors in using DNA testing to find pregnant people, it’s a high likelihood.”
“It’s probable that it’s going to happen again. I see the ways that pregnant people’s rights are trampled over and over and over again, so them being able to have access to one more tool to be able to cause harm is angering less than it’s fear.”
Depending on how far into the pregnancy they are, women in these states face prison sentences ranging from a few months to life in prison. Science is advancing rapidly, and DNA identification is getting quicker and cheaper. Will we be tracked tomorrow for trivial events of our daily lives?
In Hong Kong, metro passengers were surprised to see their software-generated sketches posted on the walls. With the agreement of the government, an association has reported citizens who throw their garbage on the ground. The DNA taken from the cigarette butts, cans, or used masks has made it possible to edit their photo in 3D. Could this campaign of shame under different circumstances be rejected?
“When you get to a place where you are able to track people, the ability to become anonymous disappears. At a point that the government has the capacity to identify you precisely with no extra effort, right? Like all they need to do is to take a swab or to take a blood sample and boom, they know exactly who you are. That is a second layer of the element of totalitarian state’s ability to engage in social control.”
“This is the world that we can very clearly see coming in the near term. I wish that I could say that we were talking about, you know, Star Trek-level kinds of fantasies, but that’s not the world that we’re in right now. We’re in a world where the pieces exist, and the puzzle just needs to be put together.”
The DNA of millions of Europeans is already registered in the files of national police forces but also in hospital databases. 5 million Europeans who have bought consumer kits, bypassing the rules, are also on file with foreign private companies. In total, in Europe, nearly 40 million DNA profiles are stored in computer servers, but this highly sensitive data is poorly protected.
Renaud Leafitz is an expert in computer security. He shows us that with a few clicks on a simple search engine, we can access hundreds of profiles.
In our DNA, we do not only find data corresponding to our appearance. A DNA file is a simple text file composed of hundreds of thousands of lines. Each of these lines corresponds to a characteristic of our genetic heritage, called “SNP.” A free directory references each characteristic in our DNA. By entering “depression,” “predisposition to alcoholism,” or “lung cancer” in the search bar, one finds the right road to look at.
Imagine…
For a few months now, a new startup has been offering a simplified version with colored symbols. A future employer could check our intellectual capacities, if we have a tendency to be aggressive, a propensity to addictions, or even to determine our vulnerability to burning out.
Not everything is written in our genes. These predispositions influence our health and our personality up to 40%. The rest depends on the environment and our lifestyle. This man is a consultant in the health insurance sector. Anonymously, he explains that insurers are already looking at our genetic data.
In France, the insurance sector is extremely regulated. Opening the market to foreign companies could change this.
In the United States, this is already a reality. The systematic identification of the population is underway. Since the 80s, a federal law has imposed DNA sampling of millions of Americans at birth.
Nicholas is only 2 days old.
“We’re going to do his newborn screening today. So we’re mandated to do this because it gives us the best amount of information for your baby to keep him healthy, including 57 tests that we wouldn’t usually particularly test for. So we’re going to put this little heel warmer on his heel and get his foot nice and toasty, okay?”
“Baby is always happiest in mom’s arms, so we always like to keep baby in mom’s arms as well, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Really, most people forget that they even had done, but they did, and it’s really beneficial to your baby’s health for sure. Yep. So we’re going to do a little heel stick on the bottom of his foot, okay? Right onto this ridge, okay. All right. So one, two, three. Yep, just like that. Okay. Now we’re going to fill each of these little circles.”
“Okay, okay.”
Some very populated states like California or Texas keep the DNA of newborns for life in large databases. Officially, this data is used for medical research, but who knows what this information will be used for later? Police files, genealogical records, and even national data—all on file. Will this really make for a better world?
