 Think tech away, civil engagement lives here. Okay, we're back to likeable science here on a given Friday afternoon with our chief scientist, Ethan Allen. Welcome back to your show, Ethan. Glad to be here. Thanks for joining me. You know, we were talking just a moment ago about how it wouldn't be great to get back to the 17th century, because, you know, then there wouldn't be all these complications that technology and science have wrought for us. But there wouldn't be any benefits either. There wouldn't be any dentists to help fix your teeth is the problem. Yeah, most of your kids would die before age five. You were talking about a little pill that would wipe out, you know, a number of large percentage of the population with no pain and just disappear them. Right. And, you know, I'd be in favor of that, you know, I mean, although there are ethical considerations to it, I feel a lot like that. But you know, as long as they don't disappear, you and me, as long as we can finish our show here. There we go. I'm good. But it would make the world a kind of easier place in many ways. Yeah. If you thought 90% of the population people on earth were gone, there's a lot less pressure on things. Less pressure. Hopefully the people as they recovered could not make the same mistakes we had made before. Yeah. Yeah. And the science would be rolled back. Maybe we need that. And that takes me to the title of our show, here on Likeable Science. Your genes, your privacy and the public good, whatever's left of the public good these days, rights to privacy against law enforcement obligations and new technologies that allow them to play out those obligations. Right. And we're talking specifically about the incident where the Golden State serial killer, whatever it was, he was found only a week or two ago on the basis of DNA evidence. Right. Can you tell the story? Well, so this guy had done multiple murders and rapes back in the 1970s in California, I think around the Sacramento area. Never left much trace, but did leave a little DNA they were able to find on one scene I guess or a couple scenes. They weren't able ever to do anything with that. But now because of sites, I don't know which site it was, they didn't specify whether it was Ancestry.com or 123ME or whatever. These sites where people upload samples of their DNA basically and search for relatives and want to know more about their ancestry. So the police basically took that DNA they had sitting there, sort of made a profile of this guy and stuck it up and said, you know, why my matches? And I don't find who my family is here. And they found family basically. And when they found family members, they were then able to triangulate better. And sure enough, they found this guy who had been, who was an ex-cop, who lived in that same area at that same time and suddenly one thing led to another and they were able to make a convincing case that it was him. That's stranger than fiction. This would be great on CSI. I'm only sorry on CSI. I didn't pick it up. Maybe they will later in one of the episodes. It'll be interesting to see it in the court case. I mean, they had to follow him around and get samples of his DNA without his knowledge basically from things he left and things he touched. Is that an invasion of something? Well, some courts I think have held that. And I don't know what the current US rulings are on that. And there was a whole issue of the people who posted their DNA there. That guy's family basically. Was their privacy invaded in some way? I don't know. Yeah. Maybe they didn't like him anyway. They did apparently, those people all did sign something on that website that sort of said your data as well as looking for your relatives, your data may be used for other purposes. Other purposes meaning criminal investigation. It wasn't specified apparently. But this article in Nature pointed out, you know, we're gonna have to be sort of addressing this kind of stuff and we can't just sort of let it fall by the wayside and have things like this keep happening. Right. Yeah. Let's unpack for a minute. Okay. So the guy commits all these crimes and he leaves his DNA in some places, maybe his hair, something like skin, who knows what. And the police even years later, you know, because at the time he did this, the DNA technology was really not in play. So later on years they go back and they look at what I suppose that the bodies or the scenes of the crime and they find examples of his hair and his skin and nails, what have you. I suspect they pulled that stuff out knowing it was evidence of time but they couldn't do much with it. Ah, maybe so. Yeah. Yeah. Until I had him to match it with. Yeah. Yeah. So of course, you know, there's a whole chain of custody issue about, you know, where did they get it from and how well, you know, preserved was the chain of custody. But let's assume they could show a good chain of custody even years later because the more time it goes by, the more difficult it is to show the chain of custody because the witnesses who would tell you how it got from point A to point B aren't around. Right. And the systems may not be as explicit as they are today. Okay, so now we have this DNA and it's one of those closed cases. There's a program on television like that, closed cases and some investigators, some smart investigators, hmm, we have DNA, let's see what we can do with Ancestry or one of the others. And so they go to Ancestry and they say, we have the DNA and here are the specs of the DNA. Look in your database for what, genetic characteristics which I guess must be reduced to numerical factor, numerical data. Right. And sequences. Sequences. Sequences. They say, you know, what do you got that's like this? And apparently the science is such now that they can actually find what they got like this, that must be an interesting experience. Right. And the data, you know, the dots and dashes and the zeros and ones, they match up at least to some extent, not a lot necessarily, but close enough to say, hmm, this is a lead. Right. God, CSI must be wild about this. Okay, so, all right, so now we got a lead. We know it's not the same person or we can assume. They didn't have a perfect match. Not a perfect match. They could have had a perfect match. Except he had never put his DNA up on that. Ah, okay, right. If he, well, if you know, if you are a serial killer, do not send your DNA, listen to what I'm telling you. Exactly. Exactly. And furthermore, you know, if you have any relatives around, tell them not to do it either. You know, we're going to jail. Goodness. Okay, so they find people who are close. Right. How close are these people they found? I don't, I don't know the details of that. I assume, again, by the percentage match to the DNA they had, the sample from the suspect, they could say, these are likely siblings or uncles and aunts or cousins. They could probably give a rough relationship match, again, that then narrows the pool of suspects, basically. So they can tell the proximity in a family way. So they can actually create, I guess, sort of ancestry does this, doesn't it? Right. They can create a kind of a family tree based on what they have. Right. And certainly they can see if this guy, his DNA, is in or close to that tree by the proximate, you know, proximate data. Yeah, they've done it thousands of times, found people's long lost relatives. Sure. Sure. They do it all the time, don't they? Yeah. Yeah. Different parentage than you thought. You know, like, oops, all kinds of different things. They weren't thinking of chasing serial killers when they invented that. No. No. They wanted to make some money and help you understand your ancestry, right? Right. They never thought. Right. Somebody had the bright idea of going to them. Right. Now, this is interesting. So the cop, and I know he's the kind of cop that we'd see on television all day long, handsome, you know, he said, he wakes up one day, aha. He says, I will go to ancestry. What a bright guy. He must have had scientific training, yeah? Maybe he was on one of our shows with you. So he says, aha, I will go to ancestry and I will see if they can make a match or a close match on this. Okay. What does ancestry say to him? Because ancestry, like any database company these days, you know, should be at least a little, like Facebook, a little concerned about your personal data? I suspect, it's my reading between the lines and what I've read. He didn't say this is a police investigation. He just uploaded a profile. This is, you know, this is the DNA profile that we've got, you know, and I'm looking for matches, you know, just like anyone else would know. Oh, like it was his. Sure. No search warrant. No judge involved. No nothing. And again, the data on these databases is, to some extent, public data. People have signed off, typically, in saying that it's public data. You know, they understand. They want it searched, right? Sure. Find my ancestry. It's mine. Find my ancestry. You don't put it up there and expect it to be shielded and protected and hidden away and nobody gets to see it because there'd be no point up there. Sure. The idea is to mind a match. Right, yeah. Yeah, that's what it's all about. So it's very interesting. And there are people who are very upset at the police who feel it was a big overreach. I'm sure the killer is really ticked off. I'm sure the killer's attorneys are working big time to find what do we have that we can, yeah. I mean, there have been those cases in other places about dealing with that kind of thing. Is your DNA your own? And if you've discarded a cigarette butt, is that a cigarette butt like your property? Or can the police now pick that up and get DNA off of that legally? Yeah. In general, as far as I know, it's been, if you've discarded something, you've thrown it away, you know, that's, you've indicated you have no interest in it. So it's sort of a fair game for them to grab. I suppose I snoop in your trash can. Right. I mean, I don't know if trash cans are protected these days or maybe not, but... But they can't like walk up to you and say, you know, stick out your tongue and let me swab it, you know. But who knows, you know, there's lots of ways to see people into providing their DNA. But the technology, yeah, it's getting so much better, somebody brushes by you in a crowded street and they may have brushed by you and swabbed you, you know. Swabbed you right on your arm and your, a little hair. Just, you know, take a little hair. The guy doesn't even realize it. Yeah. Yeah, so I mean, you know, there's so many questions that come to mind. I mean, one is, can the police do this? They're kind of deceiving ancestry. Right. You know, is that protected? It's going to have to go up the courts, I think. Right. The other thing is, suppose you were wanting to find out something about somebody and so you somehow managed to get some DNA. You could pretend to be that person and you could find out a lot of things about that, you know, genetic things about that person. Oh, yeah. Family, her family way back when. Sure, sure. You know, actually, oh, God, can you imagine, you're engaged or you're dating, you're dating a person, got this, you're dating a person. And somewhere, you know, somewhere in the process when you, you know, intimate with this person, you get a little DNA. Excuse me, can I just, you know, can you swap or some hair off your arm? Right. If you mind? Doesn't take much though. The following day I sent it to Ancestry and now I know, you know, who's who. Right. I can find out who her, you know, family is. Right. Whether they're rich or poor, I can look them up, right? Right. I can find out who the real person is. So apparently a few years ago in Sweden they had one of their kings, I think King Alfred, or some bones they thought were King Alfred, but it wasn't clear and they actually went in and did this and confirmed that it really was him. But the Swedes refused to release the sequences because they pointed out, yeah, this would give all kinds of information to family members about health issues, about relatedness. Sure. You know, that sort of, they didn't need to know particularly. Sure. You know, you can get all kinds of information, including information that you and I cannot even figure out yet. Oh, yeah. You know, it could be anything and everything, including medical information. It could be incredibly valuable stuff to know in advance, too. I mean, for instance, you find out that you've got Huntington's disease, right, a young person, that, you know, you're going to be dead by the time you're in your late 40s. And... If I'm about to marry you and have a bad end, you know. Yeah. You have to know about that. Put your affairs in order early on and be sure everything's clean and neat, right? Yeah. So, yeah. Okay. And suppose I'm interviewing you for a job and I take you out to the company cafeteria and I say after you finish your coffee... Can I please have your coffee cup? Right. I like to, you know, keep the coffee cup in my file folder. Yeah. And the following day you're checking up on everything about this person. I would need... You don't need a search warrant? I would not be surprised to find that kind of stuff goes on. Yeah. At all, at all. You don't say a word. Indeed, if you're a place like the NSA or the CIA, I would be shocked if they're not doing that, quite frankly. I mean, they should be, you know. Yeah. But they're watching this program. They will be. Don't watch. So, you know, what's going on here is sort of an acceleration of technology that can find out the secrets of our lives right down to our cell structure and our DNA without us necessarily knowing about it and then taking that information and using that in, you know, in business context, in family context, in criminal context. Yeah. And it's, again, it's one of these interesting issues where the science and technology have sort of gotten out a little bit ahead of the control systems for them and we don't quite know, you know, how we can and how we should use this. I mean, with nuclear bombs, right, we did that, we use them rightly or wrongly, you know, now everyone pretty much agrees. Like, that's a big no-no. You shouldn't, you shouldn't. Don't do a nuclear bomb. Yeah. Right. That's messy. Yeah, long, long. Yeah, but DNA and sequencing and all that. Right. We don't know yet. Yeah. But you know what? The good news, the good news is that right after this break, you and me, we're going to figure it out. We're going to know. We're going to come up with a solution on all of this. I can hardly wait. Aloha. My name is Mark Shklav. I'm the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea comes on every other Monday at 11 a.m. Please join us. I like to bring in guests that talk about all types of things that come across the sea to Hawaii, not just law, love, people, ideas, history. Please join us for Law Across the Sea. Aloha. Good afternoon. My name is Howard Wigg. I am the proud host of Code Green, a program on Think Tech Hawaii. We show at 3 o'clock in the afternoon every other Monday. My guests are specialists both from here and the mainland on energy efficiency, which means you do more for less electricity and you're generally safer and more comfortable while you're keeping dollars in your pocket. You know, Ethan, I really enjoy our discussion. That's Ethan Allen, our chief scientist of Think Tech. And during the discussions because it always leads to more and more questions. And, you know, we begin to see the, you know, the prospects of new technology and even look over the horizon and see even greater technology going forward. You know, it's like, for example, you and I discussed CRISPR, you know, and last Sunday on 60 Minutes, you know, my wife says, oh, that's really fabulous. That's a fabulous technology. You know, Ethan and I discussed that years ago. So, we're ahead of the game here. Thank you for that. You're welcome. It's always fun. Okay, so we know that there are draconian things that can happen, especially in criminal investigations, but maybe in many, many other things in the world. You know, government can be used for eugenics in the worst sort of way, right? Yeah, it's your essential, you. And you were saying during the break about viruses, about how we generate all these viruses. So, we don't even know the extent of the information that can be gathered about us. We are a tableau of bacteria and viruses and DNA. We have special footprints. My God, our chemical makeup, our biochemical makeup may be able to tell people what we've been doing ourselves, right? Sure. People can now actually, that is, if you put your finger down on the surface, they can not only pull DNA of yours off there, but they can pull enough DNA of the microbiota that lives on in your skin, they can essentially uniquely identify you by that, not even by your own DNA, but by the stuff that lives on you. Yeah. I mean, it's really amazing that we're more and more of this big data technology, the ability to look at data on a vast scale is really reshaping our understanding of the world. We didn't have any clue until a few years ago if the oceans are just filled with viruses. And they're, I mean, literally filled to the extent that they're always being, you know, blown up out of the water by salt spray and everything, and because viruses are so, so tiny, they're not affected by gravity, particularly so they drift actually above the jet stream and gradually just rain down upon us. And I say gradually to the tune of 800 million viruses per day, per square meter, all over the earth. It's incredible. I mean, it's incredible. We didn't know this. Now we know this. And what those viruses can tell us, not only putting your finger down, maybe you look in your brain, non-vasively and find out what you're thinking. Wasn't there a movie about this, Pre-Crime? Remember Pre-Crime? I didn't see Pre-Crime. Yeah, the Minority Report. You remember that one? So you get actually sense what the other guy is going to do, and then you, you know, you try to stop him. You prosecute him for a crime he didn't commit, but he is likely, predictably likely to commit. So, I mean, so much information that we could get, and we will get going forward, that we really have to take this moment and stop and think, you know, how does this affect our condition in the world? Exactly. There are now tests for certain receptors in certain tissues that you can take and that will predict people's tendency sort of towards high impulse behavior, you know. Or even criminal behavior. Well, yeah, and that's the thing, is people who really tend to have a lot of high impulse particularly given certain environmental conditions tend to be the people who are end up in the jails and committing a lot of crimes. And if you spot somebody with this, are you allowed, allowed now to take proactive steps and either hopefully help calm this person down, help give them a supportive environment where they're not going to want to channel their impulsivity into artistic creativity or something like this, you know. Yeah, well, I'm going back to CRISPR. You know, I can find that you have the tendencies that are going to create problems, social problems, so I take your DNA and I fix you, you know. You're not going to do that anymore. I splice and dice and your DNA has changed with CRISPR. This is coming in 60 minutes since the next five years. You and I will find out sooner than that. And so I'm changing you and I'm reducing the risk that you're going to be a social problem. But then I might find that I can't change you and I can't do it. In which case I give you that pill that we've talked about before. It'll make you disappear. It doesn't hurt. It'll just disappear. And so in a way we control the development of the species that way, one method or another by predicting what that individual will do. Right. But I mean, it's the same kind of thing. Can you medicate people against their will if they are presenting a danger to themselves or others. So schizophrenics. Yes. Often would rather deal with all the pain and agony of their schizophrenia rather than taking some particular first round, first round of drugs they developed which had really bad side effects. That's the problem. I mean if you let government, ooh, government, if you let government do it at once you know, such as protect us from socially unacceptable, what it considers socially unacceptable human beings that's really out of control. That's not consistent with our civilization if you want. The highest forms, the highest thinking in our civilization or civilization. So the question is, are we going to stop government from getting this information. I mean if you look at the Facebook example I don't think too much happened to stop Facebook. I think they just changed their public relations campaign. There's a piece about that today on HPR. So the question is, you know, are you going to try to stop government? Are the courts going to stop government? Are the courts going to say you can't get that information from Ancestry and use it to do a criminal investigation because it's invasive. I mean actually in Norway apparently they did that. There was a suspected killer who had then died at a hospital before he was actually convicted and the police wanted to get his DNA to sort of confirm this and the hospital said no. He's still got a right to privacy basically once he's dead, you know. That may be settled law in Sweden if it is settled. It's certainly not settled here. Right, yeah. And it seems to me that this is exactly the thing. It is more and more we're seeing that we're being faced with new questions about what is okay to do. But I mean your answer can we stop the government from doing that? I don't think we can. I mean big data is here to stay, you know. The technologies to gather it are now routine, widespread, growing every day. I mean I have to accept that. What about Walden Pond? We spoke of Walden Pond. Right, right. Why can't I go off into the woods with my DNA and be disconnected from all of this? And you can do it. But you're still going to be on Google Maps. You know, somebody else can still probably track you down. My cusses? Right. They can scrape your DNA off your porch, you know. So how does this change my life? I mean, let's do it in a differential. One is if we stop the government from doing that, it's going to mean that I remain free to use that term. You know, from this kind of invasive investigation. This means like commercial applications and the bad guys are going to use that information. That's true. That's true. The bad guys can find me. The bad guys can look for you too in Walden Pond. But in any event my privacy is done. Even Trump said that recently. Privacy is done. And I think what it means is two things. One is there is no privacy. There's no you can't hide from your past. You can't hide from your cousins. You can't hide from the police or government ultimately unless the government takes a position on this. And that is going to change my conduct. I mean, is it fair to say do you think that I am less likely to be a serial killer if I know for this case that somebody can find me even if I cover my tracks? Yeah, one presumes that and I think studies have shown this. Basically if punishment for crimes is more swift and more certain the crime rate does tend to go down. If crime you can get away with it, your odds of being caught are low and the punishment even if you're caught is sure, you know, why not do the crime? So that's a positive thing. Right, in that sense it is. Again, like all these things it's a two-edged sword. But then government can abuse it. Government can want to make a certain subset disappear for reasons that are not good reasons and they can find the subset so easily. I mean think of all the racial stuff going on. If you have 132nd of some kind of racial blood or DNA, they're going to find you so easily using the same technique they used with the Golden, what do you call it, the killer in San Francisco. So that's pretty scary. You become subject to all kinds of bad things. And so now there's a whole thing, I'm sure there must be a black market in it is for sort of doing fake IDs in the sense of putting up a fake ancestry.com DNA sample, you know, and trying to essentially make the database unreliable, right, by confounding it with false data, with bad data. We talked about that before the show began it's so interesting to think that okay, you and I sitting here together we are assuming the science works. We are assuming the science is accurate and credible and that if I want to find that killer I think I can find him using the science but I can muck up that technology too. I can take the position that it's inaccurate I can meddle with it, I can somehow screw it up and then all of a sudden it's no longer credible. Right, and if that happens then the whole scientific enterprise suffers a blow and basically humanity does. I think it's pretty inarguable that science and technology really have vastly improved a lot of humans. More and more people live like we, you know, our infant mortality is a tiny fraction of what used to be our lives are longer, healthier, yes we don't spend years rotting teeth on our heads and I mean in a thousand ways we're better off due to science and technology so, you know, I don't want to see the trust in science deteriorated, you know I don't want to see that I plant your DNA next to a dead body and so now the police are all confused at a fundamental point of their investigation and then because you've done this show you have plenty of stuff that you can now make a video of me saying oh, I killed this guy, I was pissed off at him and I slaughtered him right, right, a confession essentially and I manipulate the sound the sound from the waveform of your voice, I've seen that and there I've confessed on tape and my DNA has been found next to the body what more do they need? just as this technology can be used to discover the killer it can be used to frame the killer and then, you know you go to court, ultimately I'm afraid the human condition requires going to court and hashing this all out and having a prosecutor at a defense whatever you need to argue that maybe it's not accurate or maybe it is accurate there was a question when fingerprinting first came out was that a legitimate technology to use was it meaningful, did it really identify people and it's now been well established it's pretty decent, if properly done and the judge or jury or the little black box machine which will succeed the judge or jury will have to determine whether it's likely, whether it's true whether the technology was properly used whether there's a frame going on and I suppose you would look at diverse sources of information multiple sources if you have them and you would let the trier of fact whether it's a judge or a jury or a little black box determine which one is right and which one is wrong and how you take them all together and what is to come out and so the technology would be used to figure out whether the technology was working there we go, right Ethan, I'm just so concerned that we live in a time where there seems to be such hope with this technology and yet I think we have to be wary that it can be used against us we can use it against ourselves others can use it against us and all you can do is remain informed absolutely, absolutely you got to stay up with it, it's why more and more we need good science education we need good technology education we need to have a world filled citizens who understand some of these issues and world filled with people who also have been taught good ethical behavior understand our obligations to one another and to our planet I hear you that's Ethan Allen, he's our chief scientist he's unlikable science and what he's telling you is keep watching this show, stay informed thank you Ethan thank you Jay