NY senator from LI introduces ‘familial DNA’ legislation
By Chau Lam,
Newsday
| 12. 09. 2016
A day after the Queens district attorney announced he’d asked the state to approve a new type of DNA analysis in hopes that it would help police develop additional leads in the case of a female jogger found strangled this summer in Howard Beach, State Sen. Phil Boyle on Friday introduced legislation that would authorize the use of the controversial method in some cases.
Boyle (R-Bay Shore) said he drafted the measure after speaking with Philip Vetrano, father of Karina Vetrano, 30, whose body was found near a jogging path at the north end of Spring Creek Park in Queens on Aug. 2. The NYPD said she had been sexually assaulted.
“Having worked on DNA-related legislation for over 25 years, I see the use of ‘familial’ DNA testing as the next significant step in assisting our law enforcement officials in solving these sickening crimes and getting these violent criminals off our streets,” Boyle said in a statement.
Boyle’s proposal came one day after District Attorney Richard A. Brown asked the Division of Criminal Justice Service’s Commission on Forensic Science to...
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...