1.7m DNA Profiles Cut From Database
By Press Association,
Press Association
| 10. 24. 2013
More than 1.7 million DNA profiles of innocent adults and children have been deleted from the national database, ministers have revealed.
As part of the Government's commitment to slim down the amount of information held by the state, more than 1.6 million fingerprint records from innocent people have also been deleted.
Some 480,000 of the DNA profiles removed from the database were from children, Criminal Information Minister Lord Taylor of Holbeach told Parliament.
In a written statement he said the Government had " delivered its commitment to reform the retention of DNA and fingerprint records by removing innocent people from the databases, and adding the guilty".
Some 7,753,000 samples, containing "sensitive personal biological material", have been destroyed because they are no longer needed as they have been used to create a profile.
Lord Taylor said 1,766,000 DNA profiles from innocent people had been deleted from the National DNA Database (NDNAD) and 1,672,000 fingerprint records had been removed from the national fingerprint database.
He added: " At the same time, 6,800 convicted murderers and sex offenders, not on the database under...
Related Articles
By Emily Glazer, Katherine Long, Amy Dockser Marcus, The Wall Street Journal | 11.08.2025
For months, a small company in San Francisco has been pursuing a secretive project: the birth of a genetically engineered baby.
Backed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and his husband, along with Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong, the startup—called...
By Jessica Hamzelou, MIT Technology Review | 11.07.2025
This week, we heard that Tom Brady had his dog cloned. The former quarterback revealed that his Junie is actually a clone of Lua, a pit bull mix that died in 2023.
Brady’s announcement follows those of celebrities like Paris...
By Emily Mullin, Wired | 10.30.2025
In 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui shocked the world when he revealed that he had created the first gene-edited babies. Using Crispr, he tweaked the genes of three human embryos in an attempt to make them immune to HIV and...
Public domain portrait of James D. Watson by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
and the National Human Genome Research Institute on Wikimedia Commons
James Watson, a scientist famous for ground-breaking work on DNA and notorious for expressing his antediluvian opinions, died on November 6, at the age of 97. Watson’s scientific eminence was primarily based on the 1953 discovery of the helical structure of DNA, for which he, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or...
