The FBI Is Very Excited About This Machine That Can Scan Your DNA in 90 Minutes
By Shane Bauer,
Mother Jones
| 11. 20. 2014
Untitled Document
Robert Schueren shook my hand firmly, handed me his business card, and flipped it over, revealing a short list of letters and numbers. "Here is my DNA profile." He smiled. "I have nothing to hide." I had come to meet Schueren, the CEO of IntegenX, at his company's headquarters in Pleasanton, California, to see its signature product: a machine the size of a large desktop printer that can unravel your genetic code in the time it takes to watch a movie.
Schueren grabbed a cotton swab and dropped it into a plastic cartridge. That's what, say, a police officer would use to wipe the inside of your cheek to collect a DNA sample after an arrest, he explained. Other bits of material with traces of DNA on them, like cigarette butts or fabric, could work too. He inserted the cartridge into the machine and pressed a green button on its touch screen: "It's that simple." Ninety minutes later, the RapidHIT 200 would generate a DNA profile, check it against a database, and report on whether it...
Related Articles
By Jessica Hamzelou, MIT Technology Review | 07.30.2026
As of this week in Montana, any biotech company with an experimental drug has a clear path to selling it to consumers. Companies whose drugs have been through preliminary testing—sometimes in as few as 10 healthy people—can pay $12,500 to...
By Jessica Hamzelou, MIT Technology Review | 07.23.2026
When it comes to organ donation, time is everything. As soon as an organ has been carefully removed from a donor’s body, it starts to deteriorate. Surgeons have a matter of hours to get it into a recipient. Leave...
By Dhruv Mehrotra , Wired | 08.03.2026
On March 13, 2025, Hugo Moreno-Mendez arrived at the McLennan County Probation Department in Waco, Texas, expecting a routine probation check-in. Instead, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were waiting to arrest him.
According to a criminal complaint reviewed by WIRED...
By Nina Agrawal, The New York Times | 07.16.2026
Ethan White first noticed something was wrong at drum practice. A snare drummer in the University of Michigan marching band, he suddenly could no longer feel the muscles in his right hand gripping the drumstick. Weeks earlier, he had marched...
