Whose DNA? Forensic boom stokes ethical fears

By Ben Hirschler

LONDON (Reuters) - In September 1987, Colin Pitchfork, a baker from central England, became the first criminal in the world to be caught by DNA evidence, for the rape and murder of two 15-year-old girls.

He was sentenced to life imprisonment the following January.

Twenty years on, analyzing DNA from blood, hair, saliva or semen at crime scenes is ubiquitous and has helped solve hundreds of thousands of crimes.

But the scale of the forensic revolution is causing unease in Britain, where the government is considering casting the DNA testing net wider by allowing police to take swabs from people committing minor crimes, like dropping litter.

The case of British toddler Madeleine McCann, who went missing in Portugal, has raised questions about modern reliance on DNA evidence after theories multiplied based on the partial results from trace amounts of biological evidence.

Alec Jeffreys, the genetics professor who invented DNA fingerprinting in 1984 and went on to help police crack the Pitchfork case, is justifiably proud of his discovery.

He has a blurry image of the first ever DNA fingerprint on the wall of his office at Leicester University in central England.

Yet he is worried. He fears society has failed to grasp the ethical issues of DNA collection, its potential for abuse and the limitations of genetic analysis.

"The legislation is lagging really rather seriously behind the use of the database," he said.

"I take the simple view that my genome is mine. Under some circumstances, I'll allow the state limited access. But prying into my DNA ...? I am wholly opposed to that."

The debate has reached a crossroads in Britain, where more than 6 percent of the population, or 4 million people, are on the national DNA database -- far more than anywhere else in the world.

The United States, home to the biggest database, has 5 million profiles for a population five times the size.

WIDER POWERS

The size of the British collection, which is growing by 30,000 a month, reflects the fact that police powers to take DNA are wider in England and Wales than in any other country.

Under 2001 rules DNA can be taken without consent from any person arrested for a serious, or "recordable", crime and kept even if that individual turns out to be innocent. In Scotland, samples must be destroyed if there is no charge.