 Welcome to Building Tomorrow, a show exploring the ways that tech, innovation, and entrepreneurship are creating a freer, wealthier, and more peaceful world. As always, I'm your host Paul Matzko, and with me in the studio today are Aaron Powell and Matthew Feeney. Now today we're going to talk about the hot topic of DNA databases, which have implications for everything from fighting crime, the Fourth Amendment, the Constitution, medical innovation, and the answer to that eternal teenage question, Mom, Dad, who are all these random second cousins at the family reunion? Why should I care? But let's start with a killer, the Golden State Killer specifically. Matthew, why don't you kick us off? Why does the capture of a serial killer from the 70s in California matter to those interested in DNA databases? Yeah, so some listeners might already be aware that earlier this year, police in California made an arrest of the alleged Golden State Killer. This was a killer who not only killed about a dozen people, but also committed dozens of rapes and a ton of burglaries. And this killer and rapist had been rather elusive for decades. But the police finally arrested a suspect thanks to a website that many people associate with family tree research, right? So the police in this case, they had DNA that had been left over at a couple of the crime scenes, but the DNA wasn't really getting them very far, right? And someone, and I'm sure there'll be a really interesting, I don't know, HBO miniseries about this in the coming years, decided like, well, why don't we get this DNA and upload it to one of these sites, like 23andMe or MyHeritage Ancestry, that specializes in family tree ancestry research. So they plug it in, the actual name of the website was GEDmatch in this case. And doing that they were able to identify the suspect's great, great, great grandparents. The suspect was not in one of these websites, but everyone listening should be aware that they have 32 great, great, great grandparents. So with that information and information based on other people who had uploaded their DNA to the site, they were able to build a family tree or actually numerous family trees to try and identify who the suspect might be. And whittling it down from the family tree total, they took it down to people who were the right age, the right location, the right profile. And they identified one suspect who turned out to not be the right person. But they went down the list to another suspect, waited for what the police have described as discarded DNA, which would be DNA found in the trash, whether that's hair from a comb or a used toothbrush. We don't know exactly what kind of DNA that was. They compared the discarded DNA to the DNA from the crime scene and boom, they had a match. And so this guy has been arrested and trial is pending. Yeah. It's the kind of thing just for our listeners to get a sense of what this looks like, we'll have to put up in the show notes an example family tree for how this works. But it's a matter of triangulation. So you take this database, they're unlikely to have the actual DNA of the offender, using, you can kind of extrapolate into the past connections between multiple second or even third or fourth degree cousins. So as long as there's two within this broad family tree going back six or seven generations, you can, from the kind of the similarities between those cousins, you can triangulate the suspect in the family tree, right? And so with that grandfather with how many was it, 32 family trees potential there, you can identify which one of those family trees the killer's in. And so then you go through a pool of suspects and that really narrows down that pool of say several dozen or several hundred suspects tremendously. Okay, which one of our suspects belongs in that family tree that we just triangulated from a DNA match. But maybe we should take a step back. So we've got police catching the Golden State killer using a DNA database like 23andMe and Ancestry. That's not what these databases were designed to do, right? They were designed to do something else. I think Matthew, you said that you are on one of these. Yeah, it was a really interesting writing about this case because I actually am a 23andMe customer. I'm also a MyHeritage customer. So family history is a bit of a side hobby of mine. I'm very interested in history. Not everyone is, thinks this is a rather odd hobby, right? But it interests me. So you, at least with 23andMe, you sign up and they send you a kit. You spit in the tube. You send back the tube and they whirl it around and analyze your DNA. And they can give you ancestry information. So these are the kind of ethnic groups that your ancestors are associated with. You can also sign up for health information. 23andMe, after a few fights with the FDA, I should add, are now allowed to screen the DNA for certain risks, certain diseases that you may carry. And using that data, you can upload 23andMe data to MyHeritage, which is not only has a ethnicity estimator tool, but also a family tree building tool. And the crucial thing to keep in mind here is that, it's a cliche, but it's true, but we're all related, right? That actually all the three of us sitting in the studio, we really wouldn't have to go that far back at all in human history to find a shared ancestor for the three of us. Like we mentioned earlier, you only have to go back a few generations before you have 32 direct ancestors. And within about a dozen or so generations, you have thousands of direct ancestors. So we are all related. And many, many people you pass all the time will be third, fourth, fifth, whatever, cousins. And so building a family tree like this for this investigation proved really valuable. And what's interesting is I think a lot of people found this kind of intuitively creepy. But for reasons that are difficult to pin down, right? Because they were only able to do this because a lot of this alleged killer's distant relatives had the same impulse as me and were interested in family history and uploaded this data. And this doesn't seem to be a violation of their privacy, right? Because they were the ones who signed up for the service. It's clearly not a violation of the privacy of the killer, because you don't really have an expectation of privacy to DNA you've left at your murder scene, right? You don't have the expectation in other people's DNA. Right. And everyone should be aware that in their own family tree there are going to be angels and demons, right? That you dig far enough, you'll find people like the golden steak killer in your family tree, but you also find really nice people too. So it's difficult to pin down where this uneasiness comes from, especially given that the privacy violation seems a little difficult to pin down. The only thing that I've discussed with colleagues here is the going through the trash, right, to find the discarded DNA there. But that's been upheld as constitutional. It's not an issue. And this is hardly the most sympathetic suspect in the case like that. What's interesting about this particular story, aside from just the kind of awesome cleverness of the slew thing, is that it flips the script on how we think about DNA evidence and the role that it plays in investigation, because until now DNA evidence was almost existed as a verification technique, right? So it was like you had largely you did traditional police work and found your suspect, and then the DNA was what then told you you'd gotten the right guy, right? But the DNA wasn't itself what really led you to the suspect because you didn't have a database that you... I mean, to some extent that did exist, but very small scale. And so in most cases, the DNA could not lead you to the suspect. But instead, what we have now is it almost makes it look more like the kind of movie style criminal profiling, you know, like serial killer profiling where we just we put this stuff out. We get like some information about our killer. We don't really know what it means or where it points. And then we put it out there and develop a picture that then narrows down the field of people. And so, you know, like the kind of person who commits this crime is probably over 45 and white and must be this tall and so on and so forth. And so it's we've turned DNA into the FBI profiling like that show. Was it Mindhunter? Oh, Mindhunter. Oh, yeah, that's a better show. That sort of thing. And I wonder if that is part of the creepiness is this notion that we're now all kind of in this potentially in this massive system that the government can just reach into and pluck us out of instead of having to, you know, figure out who it is that at any time, the stuff that we're leaving behind that we don't really have any control about leaving, you're always leaving hair and skin. And, you know, it's it would be awfully hard to not leave DNA trace everywhere that that stuff now becomes this thing that can be used at any time in this, you know, in this very automated system. I mean, that's what this was is they just take a sample sample, they upload it and the computer spits out an answer that it's it almost depersonalizes the whole process in a way that I think that that that level of depersonalization often creeps us out, that we've removed what looks like the human agency and that, you know, the cat and mouse chase and instead now it's just like you kind of feed the information to a computer and then the it clacks away and the lights flash and then this this printout slides out and says, here's your man. It's like the the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And what's the answer to the universe and life unions for everything? And was it 42 or 42? Yeah. Yeah. So it just spits it right out. Well, there's a when it comes to the kind of inherent creepiness to this, like there's a literal building a composite image that's baked into the process. So there's a new DNA database called Parabon, which so most of these like 23andMe ancestry, they were created targeting kind of amateur genealogists like like Matthew. Some of them are open source people like download their information from 23andMe and upload it to things like GEDmatch, which is like the Firefox to 23andMe's Internet Explorer, I guess, or something like that. And that's what the police accessed. But this new Parabon is saying, no, we're going to actually create a product specifically targeted for law enforcement agencies. But one of their things, if you go on the website and we'll put a link in the show notes, they generate phenotype based composite images. So like you're this percentage of Middle Eastern, you're this percentage of North African, this percentage of West Europe, and we'll create a composite image that looks like you. And it's creepy because it's, you know, the hit and miss rate is kind of all over the place. They look, it's like a lot of police sketches. There's some infamously bad ones, you know, the, my favorite is when they're doing one of those crime shows and they sit the, they sit the victim down with the police sketch artists and they come up with this blobby picture of someone. And does this look like the person who attacked you? And sometimes you get that look in their eyes where they're like, not really at all. But I'm going to say so because that's what I'm expected to do at this point in time. But there is something kind of creepy about that, that just based off of my genetic information, an image that may or may not be accurate, accurate, an accurate reflection of me is being generated and that's what the police are now going to look for. And there's of course a potential for mistakes and abuse going on there as well that like, oh, this person looks a blend of North, you know, North African and Middle Eastern, that's who we're looking for, okay, go get them guys. There's a lot of potential for police bias to sit in there as well. But doesn't it have a baked in check against, not the abuse in the sense of them hunting for all sorts of people and using this thing maybe more than they should, but in the, you know, getting the wrong man, because the only way that they start this process in the first place is that they have some of the, you know, the murderer or the rapist or whoever else's DNA and they upload it into the system. So even if the system spits out a image that happens to look like you and so they think that now you're a suspect, they then have the, I mean, the obvious step is to then check your DNA against the original source and that's going to clear it up right away. So you can't be like getting wrongfully convicted out of this particular investigative technique seems much more difficult than other. Well, it only gets you so far. I mean, so Matthew kind of alluded to this that with the catching the Golden State killer, they first actually did a false positive ID of a guy in a nursing home in Oregon, who they then managed to, you know, exclude out by doing a direct DNA sample, but there is the potential here for depending on how good your match is. So like if it's a second cousin and a second cousin, the overlap of their DNA is fairly close to you can do pretty well. But if it's like a second cousin and a third cousin, the DNA overlap and I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but the farther away they are, the less the match is and the less certain the match is, you're really narrowing it down to like a family or a multifamily like a, you know, the closer the match, the farther down the tree you can go closer to the roots. But the less the match, the higher up you are. So you have a real potential for false positives of family members. So I mean, the historical example would be it's like the example of President Thomas Jefferson, who, well, it is widely believed that he had, you know, he had an affair with Sally Hemings, his slave, that whether it's an affair or rape is his questionable, given the, you know, consent with a slave being problematic. Well, we actually don't know that for sure. What we know is someone in his family, there's probably eight male Jefferson's of his generation or the next generation, one of whom had sex with Sally Hemings. So there's a problem there, right? It can lead us to a group, but then it can kind of actually confirm our existing biases about which one we think it must be. So it's a tool, but it can be over predictive. Does that make... I wonder if the result then is, so one of the libertarian concerns about these kinds of databases is if they become useful from law enforcement's perspective, that the government will then want us all to contribute our DNA to them, you know, because they become more useful to more people who are in them. And so the government will like, you know, does it just become part of, I could see the kind of nightmare libertarian scenario of them just gathering like your elementary school, you send your kids to elementary school and as part of, you know, physical fitness day or whatever they take a DNA sample of your kid. But I wonder if the very problem you've identified almost solves that problem for the government without it having to institute a program of forcibly getting people's DNA because if the result is as more and more investigators use this technique. So this we have this case, it's been used a handful of times, but it's not it's not like a standard investigatory technique. But as it becomes one where they're just like, you know, we've got DNA evidence, the first time we find DNA evidence, we're going to upload it and we're going to see what we get. It's just a standard step. Then the likelihood that any one of us will at some point get the cops will come to our door and say, hey, we, you know, think you might be a match. Can, you know, we need to get a direct DNA sample from you. That's going to go, that's going to go up to the point where you can imagine a world where any one of us has been harassed in this way multiple times. And so you get sick of getting harassed. And so the way you stop getting harassed is to say, well, screw it, I'll upload my specific DNA to the database. So then they don't even come to me in the first place because they've already checked their sample against mine and ruled me out. And so we all kind of opt in just to get rid of the harassment of people wanting us to check it out. Yeah, there's this very creepy prospect of law enforcement just slowly building the family tree of the United States with like all this cooperation of sharing files that actually you know, it's it's by no means here yet, but that's that's the nightmare scenario, right, is that they will be able to to do this. And I think Aaron alluded to this earlier, which is this is something where you can be identified despite being absent from the data set, right, that they can sort of they can find you in virtue of you never having uploaded the DNA yourself. And again, Golden State Killer, not particularly sympathetic character by any means. But like Aaron said, we leave our DNA all over the place. And it's rather odd to think that even if you're the sort of person who takes steps to think, OK, I'm only going to pay in cash and I'm going to use encryption and I'm going to do everything I can to be invisible to the state. Just by walking around, you're going to be leaving traces through in virtue of biology. And that is that's an interesting and disturbing prospect, right, because your privacy here is being people. I think many people will feel that their privacy is being violated by hundreds of their distant relatives being interested in history, which is a strange idea. Quick question about that, then do we find that more or less creepy than widespread surveillance, like facial recognition in cameras everywhere? And if if it's more or less, like, what is it about that that is more or less creepy? Because they're both similar, like your this facial recognition is you out in the world kind of leaving information about yourself that the technology is now making accessible. So I think it goes back to what you mentioned earlier, that depends on the investigatory technique. So both of this can be used in different ways where you can imagine a situation where you you have a suspect on a videotape, right, but you and you think, OK, I want to find out who this is. So let's plug this face into whatever facial recognition databases and something will spit out. This isn't really like that. It's it's like, you know, let some have a canvas of faces and find and we'll see whatever hits, you know, just throw in these databases and we'll get a lot of pangs and using that we'll investigate it more. Speak, I do find facial recognition, the prospect of that being you ubiquitous, very creepy. More creepy than the DNA stuff. At the moment only. But I think I might only think that because facial recognition is actually more prevalent than I think many people realize. And fact about half of American adults already in some kind of facial recognition database. So yeah, that that's my gut feeling at the moment, but that will change as this kind of technique becomes more widely used. And not that this is with a layer concern, but it's there's an inevitability to this, which is that the percentage of people you need to actually opt in to a database is very, very small. So like 23 and me has five million samples uploaded. You can already get perhaps by one estimate, 94 percent of the US population could be identified based off that that by a second cousin to a reasonable degree of certainty from five million to get the entire I mean, five millions, a percentage of the national population is very small. My I can't do numbers off the top of my head, but it's a very small percentage. You do not need many more to essentially get a hundred percent of a hundred percent identification ratio to a possible degree of certainty to a second cousin. And that's going to happen. So you don't need the federal government to roll out the database because we're already almost there with a privately provided database. Well, then this is a question for Matthew, then on the on the legal side, because the the the was it GED match match. That's like an open source system that anyone can just pop in and and access and look things up. But 23 and me is not like I can't I can't log into 23 and me and just start looking up people by DNA information. So what's the what's the legal framework here? Like if they, you know, 23 and me may be able to identify 94 percent of the population, but is is that technique accessible to law enforcement? Well, in fact, with a lot of these services, you can find relatives and you'll get automated emails that say, like, oh, we found a estimated as was mentioned, an estimated fourth cousin. Do you want to connect? And it's like a social media site, you connect and you can compare the whatever segments of DNA you share. And there it seems like really difficult to make a privacy argument, right? Because both of you have volunteered for the surface for that reason, right? It's not as if we uploaded it not for family history, but because we want to find everyone who has a certain gene for, I don't know, brown eyes or whatever. And that's the really interesting thing about this case is that the privacy argument seems rather weak because the only reason someone would have uploaded that information to GED match is to do the kind of thing that was done, which was to identify distant relatives. And yeah, the the the legal argument is not not not helpful if you're the sort of person creeped out by this. There was one someone there was some discussion about this case, obviously, among privacy scholars after it was announced. And there was some discussion about, well, is there a possibility that maybe the police violated the law because they had to fake being someone in order to upload terms of service. Right. But it turns out that that's totally fine. And actually, there are provisions of the computer fraud and abuse act that allow police to do this. So yeah, not much to go on legally as far as protections go. So there's a comparison, I think, here to other Fourth Amendment issues like cell phone tracking, which Matthew, you've written about some here. So I'll get your input in a second. But where your cell phones constantly peeing against towers and that information is you can't I mean, it's very hard to avoid living in the modern world without your cell phone peeing on towers. And for a long time, law enforcement argued that they did not need a warrant to get access to that information that just because you let that information out into the world, it's now fair game for the police like your trash is behind your house that the police can rifle through that without a warrant. Recently, courts have said, no, you actually do need a warrant to get that ping data from from providers in at least in some cases. So I mean, I would propose that there is a similar situation here. One of the problems with GED match is that the police didn't have to get a warrant to do anything that they did in that process. Well, yeah, the question is who would you even serve a warrant to in the sense that they're just using the information that the websites providing them, right? It's not. Again, it's not like GED match had the suspects DNA and the police wanted to get the DNA data to compare to the crime scene. And if you look at websites that do this, 23andMe, Ancestry or whatever, you know, they say, look, we comply with valid court orders. But if you look at their data, it's very rare for police to actually look at these sites at the moment. We should probably expect this to increase, but it's still a very rare technique. And in fact, I think I think I'm correct and pointing out that most of the time that they actually do this, it's for not the cases we're discussing here, but mostly doing with identity fraud and things like that. And yes, you're right to point out that recently, the Supreme Court made a decision related to a case about cell site location information. But it was very, very narrow. Any listeners who want to look it up can find a carpet of the United States. But that that had to do with police access of physical location data as obtained via cell tower location information. But the court, five to four, found, yes, it is a violation of your reasonable expectation of privacy to physical location for police to gather 127 days worth of that information without a warrant. And they were like, well, finding out your physical location for more than six or seven days with without a warrant is you know, that that's not okay, that you do need a warrant for more than six or seven days. But it's not a case that particularly helps out here, that's for sure. There was another court case that I think applies, and this is more of an Aaron kind of question. I like those. There was a it was actually a dissent by Antonin Scalia, the late Antonin Scalia, who was joined by the more liberal members of the court Ginsburg, so the Major Kagan, and it was about a situation in Maryland or Virginia where someone's DNA was again kind of used in a similar method, but it was not a private database. It was with basically a family familial match to a state maintained DNA database. And the court ruled that was okay, but in this five, four dissent, Scalia said, perhaps the construction of such a genetic panopticon is wise, but I would doubt that the proud men who wrote the Charter of Our Liberties would have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection. And then Matt Ford, a journalist from the Republic, commented, six years later, it turns out that the American people may have built that genetic panopticon themselves, one self-swab at a time, which is great writing, but Aaron, like so when Scalia talks about a genetic panopticon, what's he referring to there, and do you think that actually applies to this situation? Yeah. So when you put this in the, in our outline for today, I commented that I wasn't sure how the metaphor worked. So for listeners who aren't familiar with the panopticon, this was a, Jeremy Bentham thought it was an amazing idea that he had thought up, and then Foucault came along later and said, no, no, no, this is actually a horrific idea. And I think Foucault had, was more right. But it's, it was his, his perfect prison, right? So what you have is this prison that's built in the round. So all in a circle all around are cells that people, you know, jail cells. And so they're all, the bars are all facing inwards towards the center of the big room. And in the center of the big room is a tower and a person, guards can sit in that tower and the guards are not visible to the prisoners, but the prisoners are all visible at any time to a guard who happens to look in that direction. And, and so the idea is like the guards can keep their eyes on all of the prisoners at once. But, but where it gets particularly creepy is that because the guards can't be seen by the prisoners, no given prisoner at any time knows if they're being watched. And, and the idea then is that you don't actually have to then be watching the prisoners all the time because the prisoners will kind of start self-policing because they will assume at any given moment that they're being watched. And so they'll act as if at any given moment they're being watched. And so to some extent you could get away with having no guard in the tower because the prisoners all end up kind of assuming a non-existing guard potentially. Right, right. So that's, that's the panopticon. And that, you can see that that makes a lot of sense in the like ubiquitous surveillance and the facial recognition because you have no, you know, you're out in public or you're out anywhere you could be being watched at any time. So you're going to act as if you're being watched. And so you're, you're gonna moderate your behavior with that in mind and not do anything that you think might get you in trouble. But I'm not totally sure how that applies to a DNA database because it's not like your DNA is being watched potentially at all times. And you're leaving this stuff all over the place no matter what you do and that DNA because we all know that Lamarcanism is not correct, that DNA is not somehow, you know, it has not like embedded in itself the information about your behaviors and activities. Right, right. Yeah, I think Scalia I think is rightly renowned as a good writer but I'm not sure if his pen does justice to the facts of the case here. Right. I do think that this case Maryland v. King Scalia's descent will in the future I'm sure be viewed as a very prescient piece of writing. The case though involved Maryland's database of cold case DNA. Right. So there's this guy Alonso I believe his name was Alonso King was arrested for assault and when he was arrested under Maryland law his cheek was swabbed and then there was a ping it matched DNA related to a unsolved rape and he was convicted of that rape and that was the appeal to the Supreme Court where he was making and I think Scalia was right to point this out like a rather plausible claim that, you know, you need some degree of suspicion to you can't the Maryland's argument was basically this is just like fingerprinting it's just used to ID people like this is no different to another ID verification method but as we've discussed I mean the amount you can find out about someone from their DNA goes well beyond actually anything to do with the person but also their family medical conditions they might even not know they carry it's a it's a very very revealing piece of and there's contamination issues I mean just because you find their DNA doesn't mean that they were actually on the site at that time committing that murder I mean there's sure but I guess I don't you say it's not like a fingerprint and that yes we can find all this other information but in the circumstance at hand so we have we have DNA from a crime scene that we found and now we have a person who we're curious about and we're going to check to see if they match the person who was at the crime scene that looks indistinguishable from the fingerprint thing like so yes they could also have found out that he was at risk for Parkinson's disease but that's utterly irrelevant to anything they're doing like I guess I I'm having a hard time seeing why this ought to creep us out more than fingerprints that you you know you fingerprint someone when you take them in for whatever reason and then you happen to just also upload that fingerprint to a database to see if that person you know connects to any past crimes like that doesn't seem that doesn't seem terribly bothersome to me well there's a I mean is there an issue here of overconfidence in the method so like even if the use of the DNA in the situation as a piece of like supporting evidence is defensible using it as like oh we found his DNA therefore absent any kind of circumstantial evidence or other evidence of of him being at the crime scene or being a suspect just that bit of information alone is enough to secure conviction I mean in other words the specifics specifics of the case the way in which they use use that is problematic not the fact that they use the evidence period does that make sense yeah and I think consider the the slippery slope we're on because I think Aaron is right to point out that like when I'm talking about violent criminals you're not going to get many people concerned here but listeners should if they have the opportunity actually listen to the oral argument of Maryland v. King it's one of the most interesting pieces of oral argument I've heard because the Maryland attorney stands up and says well since we've started this we've secured so many convictions and so many arrests since Gilead jumps in and says oh that's great I bet you could get even more if you conducted even more unreasonable searches and seizures right the point being that you could always defend the collection of more data by arguing that you will secure convictions for violent and serious crimes and that's right but that shouldn't be used as a justification for gathering an increasing amount of data period yeah well this is good but let's let's move the conversation to kind of the more positive spin right I mean I think it's interesting that none of us I mean there are risks to how this information is used there are potential missteps false IDs but there's nothing inherent to the idea of a DNA collection that necessarily is fundamentally like anti-liberty or anti-libertarian but why don't we look at the plus side like it'd be a mistake I think to only look at the potential downsides let's look at the advantages of a DNA database for ordinary people's prosperity health and happiness the two examples that come to mind are adoption in the case of people adopted folks trying to find their birth families as well as the kind of medical innovation implications on the adoption front I mean there is still a concern right like you may want to find your birth parent but that doesn't mean your birth parent wants you to find them and this makes it easier to kind of broach that barrier like you used to get stopped by not not find your way or you know the documents are lacking at your I don't know your orphanage or or whatnot but now you can find there's a chance you'll be able to find your parent even though they've gone out of their way to make it hard for you to do so so I imagine there'll be some drama over individual cases like that on the flip side you know there's a lot of folks who are going to find birth parents and both sides will be delighted and thank goodness there was that DNA database yeah I think well not being a parent myself but I think anyone who gives up a child for adoption must know that there is a chance like even if they want to remain anonymous especially in the age of 23 and me that this could happen so you give up your child for adoption and then years later that child spits in a tube and gets the ancestry information back and you think you're in the clear because you didn't have the service but it turns out your brother did right so then your child has figured out like oh well I've identified an uncle but I haven't identified a parent and you don't have to be sure like homes to figure out who your parent is once you've discovered that so that I'm trying to think about what kind of solution that could be to this problem but I don't even really view it as a problem in the way I think you're trying to highlight it well there's that sense of I mean the way I would put it is that to think of it as a problem as I was kind of mooting is to misunderstand who owns your genetic information right like yes your parents have an identity and there's a certain amount their genetic code is unique to them and you can maybe argue some kind of ownership right over that and we do which is why these organizations have you sign waivers that you're signing the waiver to your privacy right of your genetic information at the same time you pass on a significant portion of that genetic genetic information to your children they own the right to that information and so in other words the genetic overlap between you and your parent belongs to both of you right like just as much as you have the right as a parent to control your genetic information so to do your kids yet that information overlaps and if that I mean that's something that you really just can't you both have a legitimate ethical claim to ownership of that I can think of a potential positive related to the adoption that isn't limited to just the adoption so we're recording this on what August 2nd and tomorrow August 3rd on my other podcast free thoughts we're releasing an episode with Adam Bates about refugee situation and refugees I mean they face a lot of horrors some of them the result of the situation quite a lot of them the result of the way that governments treat them but one of the problems that they have is they come into they get admitted to a new country a refugee makes in the U.S. and now what you know they've left behind everything that they had that they maybe maybe don't know the language they maybe would have a hard time finding a job whatever else this this might enable them to you know families are powerful networks for support and so you can you know I don't know anyone in this country but if I can upload my information to 23andMe I might be able to find some second cousins some third cousins who I can you know they might not want to help me but they also might want to help me and it gives you it gives you a potential ability to find a support network in an easier way than just stumbling around asking people so your mention of refugees reminded me of another not intentional but a definite benefit of these kind of websites is that they they are used by racist assholes who want to prove a lot of their purity and turns out that people who claim to be white supremacists might be a little bit African or a little bit Jewish and maybe I had a benefit of this is actually it's helping educate more more people about that old cliche that we're all related and that actually you shouldn't care as much about your races you really do but of course as they will claim you know 23 and me is a Jewish conspiracy so we can't take that but but I do I do find all of that kind of stuff actually a real added benefit if we can learn more about the history of the species and migration that's an added benefit I think it's like the white supremacist version of you know the Henry Lewis Gates show for I think it's for history where they go and various celebrities that are like and inevitably it turns out no matter who the celebrity is your family own slaves because it's who do you think you are is it that sounds right yeah this is another American show stolen from great British television yeah but you know refined and made better as you did with the governmental system that they tried to but you didn't do with the office well that's arguable but so I think the last point at big point we should make here is to tie this to the advantages for medical innovation so you mentioned like refugees who are disconnected from family networks but whether you're a refugee or you're adopted or for whatever reason you don't have access to family knowledge about medical conditions like I know that there's a family history of colon cancer my family so because of that I'm taking steps to keep an eye on that more so I'm doing testing earlier than I would if I didn't have that knowledge so there's a real huge advantage for these databases and allowing people to detect those kind of family issues that they wouldn't be able to otherwise I mean this should actually literally extend people's lives because they're going to be able to take earlier preventive measures so that's that's a big component that's the most obvious one the other one that comes to mind 23andMe just signed a deal with GlaxoSmithKline for 300 million dollars to use 23andMe's database to help create targeted medicines over the next decade and the idea again that if you can go find all these genetic markers across large populations multiple family trees you're going to be able to do a better job of identifying which genetic markers correlate to which disorders and diseases and then target that very specifically I mean here comes potential someday in the future of like a CRISPR enabled boutique medicine targeting a particular disease across particular family lines and essentially eradicating whole new categories of genetic diseases so I mean there's really cool possibilities here going forward I think it would be a mistake to allow our concerns legitimate concerns over privacy law enforcement use national databases to cause us to kind of impede some of the beneficial aspects of these databases for people's health and prosperity and happiness so on that note I think we'll call the close for today's episode thank you for listening and until next week be well