Total genomic registration

jeston, Geektimes

In early July, the Kuwaiti parliament passed a law obliging all residents of the country, as well as foreign citizens who cross its border, to undergo DNA testing without fail. Thus, the country's authorities reacted to the terrorist attack that took place on June 26, as a result of which 27 people were killed and more than 200 were injured. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack.

The Kuwaiti Parliament has already taken care of allocating additional funding in the amount of $400 million for a universal DNA test. According to its results, the authorities should have at their disposal a database containing the DNA of 1.3 million residents of the country, as well as 2.9 million foreign citizens who are in Kuwait. For refusing the test procedure, a rather cruel punishment is provided in the form of one year in prison and a fine of approximately $ 33,000. Those who decide to commit fraud and provide "someone else's" biomaterial for tests face an even more serious punishment – 7 years behind bars. 

In 2009, a scientific paper authored by Israeli scientists was published, which shows that it is possible to modify biological material in the form of saliva or blood in such a way that a DNA test will point to another person. Moreover, the procedure of "DNA falsification" is not complicated and is available to undergraduates of the Faculty of Biology, and forensic laboratories will not be able to distinguish between real and fake DNA.

There is the only such precedent in the world for universal DNA collection – Iceland with its small population of 300,000 people. Nevertheless, many countries collect DNA profiles of criminals. The largest of these databases is the UK National Database, which opened in 1995 and contains 2.7 million DNA test results not only of criminals, but also of suspects in the commission of a crime. In Russia, the federal DNA database was created after the adoption by the State Duma in 2008 of the law "On State Genomic Registration in the Russian Federation". 

In 2008, the European Court of Human Rights recognized that the indefinite storage of a person's DNA, regardless of whether he was found guilty of a crime or acquitted, is illegal. According to current practice, such DNA was stored in the UK National Database until the death of the carrier from whom the biomaterial was taken for the test. After the court's decision, more than 850,000 such samples were destroyed. So far, in everyday practice, databases of genetic material pursue more prosaic goals: for example, the authorities of the London area collect the DNA of dogs in order to find their owner, who will not clean the lawns after walking with his pet.

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17.07.2015