Familial DNA Testing Nabs Alleged Serial Killer 258
cremeglace writes "A quarter-century of conventional detective work failed to track down the killer responsible for the deaths of at least 10 young women in south Los Angeles dating back to the mid-1980s. But a discarded piece of pizza and a relatively new method of DNA testing has finally cracked the case, police announced last week. On July 7, L.A. police arrested Lonnie Franklin Jr., 57, a former garage attendant and sanitation worker they suspect is the serial killer nicknamed the 'Grim Sleeper.' The key evidence? A match between crime-scene DNA and the suspect's son, obtained by a search through the state's data bank of DNA collected from 1.3 million convicted felons."
Re:Why don't they find the serial killer gene inst (Score:3, Interesting)
There has been some theoretical discussions [wikipedia.org] about this idea before, but the general idea [wikipedia.org] is not very popular right now.
Re:Why don't they find the serial killer gene inst (Score:4, Interesting)
Why don't they find the serial killer gene instead
It's on the list. Right after curing cancer.
Re:Why don't they find the serial killer gene inst (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, there is precedent [wikipedia.org]
The punishment involved the execution of close and extended family members.[3][20] These included:
The criminal's living parents
The criminal's living grandparents
Any children the criminal may have, over a certain age (which is usually variable depending on the time period)
Any grandchildren the criminal may have, over a certain age (which is usually variable depending on the time period)
Siblings and siblings-in-law (the siblings of the criminal and that of his or her spouse, in the case where he or she is married)
Uncles of the criminal, as well as their spouses
The criminal himself
Of course, for a complete wipe you'd want to get nieces and nephews too, a group strangely absent from the list of executed.
Data mining gone wrong. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not saying he is innocent, but i don't think we should jump to the conclusion that he is guilty either.
In fact we may need to use SNPs (Single nucleotide polymorphisms) to be good enough for a database of millions (or eventually billions) to reduce collisions to acceptable levels.
Re:Why don't they find the serial killer gene inst (Score:3, Interesting)
There has been some theoretical discussions [wikipedia.org] about this idea before, but the general idea [wikipedia.org] is not very popular right now.
None of the ideas which would actually work are popular. Doing anything to save the environment isn't popular. Doing anything about population growth is not popular.
But if we decide which ideas are good or bad based on whats popular this would explain why we are dying. I mean if we decide it's a good idea to continue giving birth to serial killers, and mentally retarded children when we could decide to have perfectly healthy children, sure it might not be a popular idea but it's still right.
Can anyone give me one reason why giving birth to disabled children is a good idea? Especially if we are talking about serial killers? From a utilitarian perspective, if given the option to have a child who is healthy or a child that is going to be a serial killer I'd choose the healthy child.
Because the family members are victims already. (Score:3, Interesting)
If you had a serial killer in your family that makes you into a victim just by the fact that you have a serial killer in your family. It ruins your family reputation and dishonors your family be default.
No I don't think killing the families of serial killers would work because you cannot kill a bad gene. The only thing you can do about a bad gene which probably exists in most families, is to allow most families to have the option to give birth to offspring without having that gene activate itself. Also it's more ethical from a utilitarian perspective to spare human lives as taking lives makes and creates misery in the same way that the serial killer does.
My solution is logical because it would work and it would make the world happier and safer. Your solution is less logical because it wouldn't work and it would make the world miserable and more dangerous. When you shut off a gene in a fetus the fetus isn't harmed, nobody has to die. When you kill an entire family then a lot of people have to die.
So let me guess, you are anti abortion because you believe killing a fetus generates as much misery and damage as killing an adult?
Re:There are starving kids in china (Score:3, Interesting)
It's the usual "DNA testing helped us catch this serial killer. Obviously this means it's all safe and dandy and no privacy worries here!" article that gets wheeled out about once every couple of months, just in case someone was starting to have concerned thoughts about all that identifying material being available to the government and its underlings.
I'm rather sceptical about these articles these days because they do seem to appear so regularly to remind us all how lucky we are. Keep an eye out and you'll see what I mean.
Re:Why don't they find the serial killer gene inst (Score:1, Interesting)
find the gene that produces serial killers and cure it
It's likely that only a fraction of the people with the serial killer gene actually go on to become serial killers, and that the rest of them express the gene in ways that are conducive to success in sports, business, and a variety of other competitive endeavors. It's just as unfair to shut genes off in an unwilling subject just because you don't like the gene as it is to cut off someone's hands because you think they might use them to steal something. Doing things like identifying genes and "curing" them without understanding how sentient beings can be constructed from atoms is all but guaranteed to deliver unwanted effects.
Re:Why don't they find the serial killer gene inst (Score:1, Interesting)
Once past your scare quote, knee jerk reaction generator, what's wrong with that?
reminds me of a csi episode (Score:5, Interesting)
they had a guy four square for a brutal rape, but the guy was unconcerned. sure enough, the dna test came back and turned out he only shared half the dna with the culprit: the murderer must be the guy's brother
so they let him loose and track down brother after brother, sample his dna, and it turns out to be yet another brother. meanwhile, the woman who was raped is murdered, and they find a hair on her body that matches the original suspect's dna 100%
while examining the original suspect again, grissom sees that his skin is strangely mottled, and he has an interesting statue in his house: the legendary greek chimera
grissom cracks the case: the guy committed the rape because he knew he was a genetic chimera. the dna of his semen was the "brother" of the dna of his blood
http://www.csifiles.com/reviews/miami/bloodlines.shtml [csifiles.com]
a genetic chimera is an extremely rare individual in which fraternal twin zygotes are created, then fuse. so different organ lines in the body are from two different "individuals". you are your own twin, you are a mix of two people. there is also the real life case of a woman who became a criminal suspect because she was suspected of kidnapping: she claimed to be the mother of a child, but a genetic test reveals she was the aunt: her own ovaries weren't hers but from her "phantom sister"
http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=2315693&page=1 [go.com]
not that this is an argument against how they caught the grim sleeper, i applaud this use of genetic profiling of relatives to solve crimes. its simple sleuthwork, and plenty of innocent people come under suspicion all the time in criminal investigations that must be ruled out with basic detective work
Re:Data mining gone wrong. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why don't they find the serial killer gene inst (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Familial Testing Was ONLY Part 1 (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, but you can. There's over 100 mutations in the genome per generation, so between any two siblings there's up to 200 differences. A complete genome decode would therefore certainly allow you to identify an individual. However, the police don't use genome decodes. They use much cruder methods of comparing individuals which will produce a fair number of false positives. Having said that, if you think you have privacy concerns now, wait until the police DO start using full genome decodes. And sooner or later they will. It's inevitable. Higher-grade intelligence, plus extra goodies like knowing what chemicals you might be sensitive to, is bound to eventually become too tempting. The technology will need to be cheaper and quicker, but that's just a matter of time.
I'm also expecting this kind of DNA work to be coupled with more sophisticated chemical analysis. If, as has been claimed, you can identify where a person has been by the chemical traces in their body, then some samples (such as blood) will likely contain those same traces. Once it becomes cost-effective and time-effective to extract that kind of extra information, it seems certain that it will become routine.
(It is unclear just how far you can go back, or with what level of detail, as far as geographic chemical tracing goes, but as some chemicals accumulate whereas others have a definite half-life in the body, it would make sense to say that geographical tracing has the potential to get fairly complex with time.)
There may well be other sources of information that have yet to be discovered or for which there are no tests (or at least, none that are well-known). For example, if there's a blood sample, it will likely contain red blood cells and may even contain trapped air molecules. That may tell you a little about the air quality at the time, placing additional constraints on both time and place of origin. No idea if it would be all that useful or cost-effective, but that's largely immaterial in comparison to the fact that clearly it is possible to imagine that further tests could exist. Once you know they can exist, you know that sooner-or-later they will exist.
(I'd be rather happier if there was a little more in the way of community policing versus some of the current practices, and if justice was a little more about balancing crime prevention via therapy and rehabilitation against the apparent need in society for revenge and retribution. It seems to me that if the criminal justice system had less reasons to be hostile, there would be less inclination to abuse that system from within. There will always be a lunatic fringe, but the smaller it is, the safer it will be to have such technology where it needs to be.)
Re:Data mining gone wrong. (Score:3, Interesting)
I know our gut tells us that when we act and it results in death it's worse than when we fail to act and it results in death, but I think our gut's wrong.
Such a position is very problematic. For instance, it makes the CEO of a drug company that fails to manufacture and distribute a malaria drug (say for profit-related reasons) worse than Stalin or Hitler, by virtue of more people dying as a result his inaction.
And how do you decide who's guilty in a case of non-action, since clearly if someone dies as a result of inaction, everyone in the world didn't act. Are they all guilty? Obviously, you would say "the person who was capable of acting" which may narrow it way down, but again, how would you decide it? What if any number of actions could have prevented the death. How do you ensure you have uncovered them all?
You probably didn't mean to frame your assertion so broadly, but you did.
Re:Why don't they find the serial killer gene inst (Score:4, Interesting)
Really interesting story about a neuroscientist who studies the links between genes, neurobiology, and crime. He's always argued that genes determine behavior: serial killers are killers because of their genes and their brain structure. But one day, at the family barbecue, he learns that his family tree is full of violent criminals and killers, including the infamous axe-murderess Lizzy Borden. So as an experiment, he decides to do genetic testing and brain scans on his family. His mother, his siblings, his kids: all normal. No abnormal genes. No unusual brain activity. Except for *one* family member, one person who was tested and who has both the abnormal genes and abnormal brain activity linked with sociopathic behavior. The person? It's the researcher himself.
So, assuming the dude doesn't have a freezer full of dead hookers we haven't found out about, that would seem to argue that it's a little simplistic to argue that a gene or genes automatically turn you into a serial killer. Studies of mental disorders have long shown that these things are complicated. If you have an identical twin who's schizophrenic, odds are pretty good that you're going to be schizophrenic- but it's not even close to 100% of the time, it's more like 50%.
Let's look at this practically, though. Say that you find out your mother, your father, your brother, or your sister has a gene that is linked with sociopathic behavior. Should they be locked up or prevented from reproducing? What if a routine screening discovered that you had that gene?
Re:Data mining gone wrong. (Score:3, Interesting)
Which of your examples do you think demonstrates a flaw in my assertion? Obviously people (including me) are not built to act from the heart on the ethical stance I'm talking about, but I see no reason someone in the position to easily stamp out malaria, but who chooses not to do so purely for reason of profit, is any less responsible for those deaths than if he killed them himself.
Of course, once you start discussing real world examples of that kind of situation, things get much more complicated: the CEO could argue that if he did such a thing, his company would fail and more lives would be lost from the company's future failure to act than would be lost from the current failure to act. And of course as soon as the argument becomes muddy like that, our natural self-interest bias kicks in and we convince ourselves that the course of action that best serves us is the most moral.
I am (to some degree) responsible for the deaths of people I've never met because I choose to buy a new car rather than buy an old one and donate the difference to, e.g., programs to provide clean water in Africa. I think there is some reasonable balance between living your life to do the most moral good and living your life to indulge yourself, but I don't think many people come close to the former. I know I don't, but I can face up to that rather than purport myself to be a good person when I know I am not.
I make irrational decisions regarding my willingness to "be good". Until I see a convincing argument to the contrary, though, I will continue to believe my decisions to be irrational rather than throw logic aside just because I can't bring myself to buck society and live according to the logic.
Of course, we are not built to be moral. We are built to breed and survive.
Re:Most disconcerting. (Score:3, Interesting)
So he left his DNA at a crime scene, then left it on some trash after the police had been following him. So as long as you don't leave your DNA at a crime scene, you won't have to worry. And as long as you don't raise armed robbers who get in the system for a match to you, you won't have to worry.
But in answer to your question, your son will be 50% your DNA (and 100% of his Y will be yours, and 100% of his mitochondrial DNA will be his mother's) so there will always be trackers in the case of children. Keeping your DNA under wraps includes not procreating.
Re:Why don't they find the serial killer gene inst (Score:4, Interesting)
Because their probably isn't one.
Or there is, but epigenetics [wikipedia.org] plays a role in turning the gene on. So the gene may be present in a large part of the population (good luck filtering it out), but its not expressed in most of the carriers.
Its also possible that, even though this gene is turned on by some environmental condition, its continued expression can be handed down through several generations. So now, we's have to weed out those with the gene plus those exposed to the environmental switch. Plus descendants for several generations. Label someone as a risk because of what their grandfather did? Good luck with that.