The essence of the method is to take some of a person’s DNA and cut it up into lots of bits with restriction endonuclease. These enzymes recognise specific sequences in the DNA. Because each of us has a unique sequence of nucleotides in our DNA, the lengths of these bits will vary from per4osn to person. Electrophoresis is then used to separate out these bits according to their size and charge. The net result is a pattern unique to each of us.
How this can be use? Well, basically this technique is mostly used by police. In the cases like murderers, rapists, burglars and muggers, this technique can help to track down then from traces of blood or other body fluids left behind at the scenes of their crimes. It is also been used in many countries as a part of immigration procedures for people claiming a right of citizenship because they are related to people already living in the country they want to move to. Here is a famous example.
In the mid 1980s, a boy was born in Britain but emigrated to live with his father. When he returned to Britain to live with his mother, the immigration authorities claimed that he was not the woman’s real son. Alec Jeffreys analysed blood samples from the boy, the alleged mother and the alleged brother and two sisters of the boy, who lived in Britain. According to the result, the mother shared half her DNA pattern with the boy, and half with the other children. The alleged brother and two sisters of the boy also shared the similar paternal bands in the fingerprint, showing that they all had the same mother. Presented with the evidence, the home Office had to admit the boy into the country in order to join his mother.
Since the genetic fingerprinting is so useful in many areas, governments are thinking about keeping a full copy of all the fingerprinting from everyone in the country. In Iceland the government has authorized a huge information-gathering project by the Icelandic genetic engineering company. They are attempting to collect the genetic code of every person in the country. This material comes in the form of blood samples form volunteers, and other sources such as medical records. This huge database provides invaluable information for researchers looking for the genetic causes of illnesses such as diabetes, osteoporosis and even schizophrenia. This is quite a good idea in some way, just like the examples above. But not everyone is happy; in fact one third of the country’s doctors have refused to co-operate with the company. Many academics, too, feel the project is wrong. Einar Arnason, Professor of Population Genetics at the University of Iceland, recently commented: ‘it is in the commercial interest of a company to sell (genetic) information to the highest bidder, presumably--- and that is not necessarily in the public interest’.
There could be other risks we should think about, too. A Company hiring staff could examine their candidates’ genetic information by analysing the genetic fingerprinting. (Since the speed of encoding the DNA sequence of Genome Project is increasing so fast, there is no doubt this will happen in the recent future) they would check who was likely to do well at the job and who was likely to steal from the cash till. An insurance company could decide whether a new client was a good or bad risk. They could check whether the prospective client was likely to live to 95, or drop dead at 40. . People may think this kind of opinion worries a little bit too much, but it’s happened already. In the United States, people have been denied health insurance and employment because they have ‘bad genes’. They armed services also take DNA tests of every new recruit.
Discussing the proposed genetic fingerprinting collection on British television’s Newsnight, Dr Karl Stefansson of decode Genetics commented: ‘It is the kind of information the medical research community has used to create new knowledge for a century, and without which we would not have medicine as we know it today.’ But he also admitted, despite claims to confidentiality, that: ‘you can never guarantee that someone’s genetic map will remain anonymous forever.’
Bibliography:
http://www.liv.ac.uk/~kempsj/fingerprint.html
<Genetics. The impact on our lives>, Paul Dowswell
<Genetic Engineering>, Jenny Bryan
<Applied Genetics>, Geoff Hayward
<Biology principles and processes>, Michael Roberts, Michael Reiss, Grace Monger
