surreptitious genetic testing
dgmacarthur | March 25, 2009New Scientist has a fascinating piece in which reporters Peter Aldhous and Michael Reilly demonstrate - with a little cash, and more than a little effort - the possibility of obtaining large-scale genetic data from someone without their knowledge or permission.
The reporters started with a glass that Aldhous had drunk water from; Reilly swabbed the glass and sent the sample to an unnamed commercial lab for whole-genome amplification (a technique widely used in forensics and research applications, which allows small amounts of DNA to be converted into larger amounts). An initial attempt to…