The UK Border Agency has scientists “horrified” at a weird, eugenics-flavoured proposal to test asylum seekers’ DNA to determine if they are truly and purely of the “race” they claim to be from. Even the scientists who pioneered DNA fingerprinting and related techniques call the idea “horrifying,” “naive” and “flawed.”

Science has obtained Border Agency documents showing that isotope analyses of hair and nail samples will also be conducted “to help identify a person’s true country of origin.” The project “is regrettable,” says Caroline Slocock, chief executive of Refugee and Migrant Justice headquartered in London. Although asylum-seekers are asked to provide tissue samples voluntarily, turning down a government request for tissue could be misinterpreted, she says, “so we believe [the program] should not be introduced at all.”

The Border Agency’s DNA-testing plans would use mouth swabs for mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome testing, as well as analyses of subtle genetic variations called single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). One goal of the project is to determine whether asylum-seekers claiming to be from Somalia and fleeing persecution are actually from another African country such as Kenya. If successful, the Border Agency suggests its pilot project could be extended to confirming other nationalities. Yet scientists say the Border Agency’s goals confuse ancestry or ethnicity with nationality. David Balding, a population geneticist at Imperial College London, notes that “genes don’t respect national borders, as many legitimate citizens are migrants or direct descendants of migrants, and many national borders split ethnic groups.”

Scientists Decry “Flawed” and “Horrifying” Nationality Tests

But wait, there’s more!

Christopher Phillips, University of Santiago de Compostela: I had been asked earlier this year by colleagues in the UKFSS about the prospects of differentiating Somali ancestries from other populations in E[ast] Africa, however, I am sceptical about the precision possible beyond a simple five global group differentiation from limited typing of Y-chromosome/mtDNA/small-scale multiplexes of autosomal SNPs. Clearly there is a serious risk of falling into the trap of over-interpretation of population variation data that has limited scope. My suggestion this spring was to perform whole genome scans to isolate informative markers and begin to build these into sets of SNPs that could then be assessed with comprehensive reference populations. However, this does not amount to consultation on the correct way to develop and test a custom ancestry analysis system. I also doubt that my suggested approach to validating the system will be pursued, since a large number of samples would be required both within the relatively large region of Somalia and from surrounding populations such as those of Ethiopia, Sudan and Eritrea. Therefore a good deal of time, money and patience would be needed to find the best markers for the purpose and then test their efficacy….Jane Evans, NERC Isotope Geosciences Laboratory: I can’t imagine how you use [isotope evidence] to define nationality….It worries me as a scientist that actual peoples’ lives are being influenced based on these methods.

U.K. Border Agency Docs and Expanded Reactions

• Eating fatty food appears to take an almost immediate toll on both short-term memory and exercise performance, according to new research on rats and people. (New York Times)

• Canadian Privacy Commissioner: Facebook has until Monday to find a way to fix its ’serious privacy gaps.’ These include the retaining of personal information after an account has been deactivated, and the sending of personal information (other than contact info) to third parties. (www.canada.com)

• Gene therapy improves vision for the blind, by creating a new fovea, the part of the retina that is most densely populated with photoreceptors. (www.technologyreview.com)

• The temperature of the sun’s outer atmosphere soars to several million degrees Kelvin (K); which is much hotter than at the sun’s surface. Scientists have been baffled by this until now. (www.spacefellowship.com)

• Seth Godin has written another unreal post, this time about the future of education. (www.sethgodin.typepad.com)

• A man is sentenced to 6 months in jail for what ?! (www.nbcnewyork.com)

• Is it now a crime to be poor? (www.nlchp.org)

• Blackwater (if you don’t know what it is, please look it up) founder is accused of murder, along with being quoted as saying he “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” and that Prince’s companies “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.” (www.thenation.com)

In science:

• A Swiss experiment shows that robots can form human-like societies, complete with traitors and martyrs. (www.dailygalaxy.com)

• www.telegraph.co.uk reports on a study: Dogs are as intelligent as two year old children. (via Slashdot, and here is a great comment)

• Multiple sclerosis successfully reversed in animals (www.physorg.com)

Ask any teacher who deals with stupid parents what they think of the whole thing. Also to be noted, this is not a school act, it’s labeled as a “human rights” act. Yeah, the human right to deprive your children from real knowledge.

“A clause in the bill, which is an amendment to the province’s human rights legislation, requires that school boards give parents written notice when controversial topics are going to be covered in the curriculum.” I bet you that some parents will find some ridiculous reason to prosecute school boards for not notifying them about the incest kids read in Hamlet. Don’t these insecurities usually reflect issues from past experiences? I guess it’s just a ploy to draw out parents who still have daddy issues to offer them therapy with those wicked Alberta Dollars. Who am I kidding–they’d rather spend that money in the form of $400 cheques for everyone in the province.

On one end, I am a firm believer in assuring that an inventor is compensated for coming up with their ideas, to encourage others to follow suit. However, on the other, this doesn’t seem to work well in today’s applications. Patents are mostly used by large companies who create products similar to competitors, and just want to avoid being sued because in order to make product “X 2.2″, and the competitor has the patent to “X 2.0″, they’re screwed. So they’ll patent their own “Y 2.0″ first, before making the improvement. It’s ridiculous.

I don’t agree with our culture of senseless lawsuits, that are just a means of secondary income. I am a firm believer in the potential of open source projects, like Wikipedia, BOINC projects (where you “use the idle time on your computer to cure diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research”), and Linux, just to name a few. I think that people are very willing to do great things without financial incentive when motivated in certain ways. Now I have a bunch of these ideas swirling in my head, I want to figure out the best approach to helping the advancement of technology and knowledge – not to mention their accessibility.

Yesterday, I read two different articles taking two seldom heard of points of view on intellectual property. One was a paper from The California Institute of Technology (CalTech), the other from Washington University in St. Louis (as reported by www.newswise.com). I wish I could hear a counter-opinion from a professional on this, because I think they make a good case.

Both argue that the traditional method of ownership of ideas is flawed to the point of slowing down innovation, as opposed to encouraging it. In my limited view, CalTech’s alternative seems to be more viable and sellable to elected officials. What they suggest is that a market-based system of incentives for inventors leads to more innovation. Their arguments make sense; for example, many people who have great ideas don’t bother to actually try to file a patent or invent it, because, in our winner-take-all system, you only need one guy to beat you to the punch to claim all ownership of what would have been your hard work. We ask “Why bother if someone else is going to do it first, or steal my idea?”. The only reason why this doesn’t produce an amount of innovation is because more than 50% of people think they’re “better than the average person”, which is obviously impossible. In a market-based system, you can take even more advantage of this social mentality.

The “knapsack” experiment they ran seems to lead to awesome conclusions, however, I disagree with them on how these results can be applied in real life. They suggest that an inventor would use her advance know-how to buy stock in the raw materials he knows will be in demand with her product. This seems flawed at best, because the crazy markup placed on newly produced goods towers over any profit initial investment in a raw material would be, especially if it were already in very high demand, and therefore expensive.

At any rate, I hope to keep hearing about these ideas and reactions on the part of elected officials and other academics. I’d expect a strong blowback from corporations, but that won’t be of any surprise. I think the idea of a market-based system should be of special appeal to conservatives, at least.