We Tried To Find 10 BuzzFeed Employees Just Like Cops Did For The Golden State Killer
By Peter Aldhous,
Buzzfeed
| 04. 09. 2019
A year ago, when cops captured Joseph James DeAngelo, the suspected Golden State Killer, the world woke up to the power of genetic genealogy. DeAngelo was identified because DNA he left at the scene of a 1980 double murder partially matched the profiles that a few of his distant relatives had uploaded to a public website to research their family history. Based on those matches, a team of detectives drew up family trees that eventually led them to DeAngelo, suspected of at least 13 murders and more than 50 rapes.
In the year since, more than 50 other criminal cases have been cracked using similar methods, launching a new forensic science industry. One estimate has suggested that more than half of the US population could be found in this way — although genealogists have warned that, in practice, complications like adoptions or misunderstandings over who is the biological father of a child can throw an investigator off track.
How hard is it to crack cases in this way? And what issues does it raise, as police recruit...
Related Articles
Paula Amato & Shoukhrat Mitalipov
[OHSU News/Christine Torres Hicks]
On September 30th, a team of 21 scientists from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) published a significant paper in Nature Communications, with a scientifically accurate but, to many, somewhat abstruse headline:
Induction of experimental cell division to generate cells with reduced chromosome ploidy
The lead authors were Shoukhrat Mitalipov, recently described here as “a push-the-envelope biologist,” and his long-term colleague Paula Amato. (Recall that in July the pair had co-published with...
By Pam Belluck, The New York Times | 10.17.2025
Before dawn on a March morning, Doug Whitney walked into a medical center 2,000 miles from home, about to transform from a mild-mannered, bespectacled retiree into a superhuman research subject.
First, a doctor inserted a needle into his back to...
By Elizabeth Dwoskin and Zoeann Murphy, The Washington Post | 10.01.2025
MEXICO CITY — When she walked into an IVF clinic in June, Alin Quintana knew it would be the last time she would try to conceive a child. She had prepared herself spiritually and mentally for the visit: She had traveled to a nearby...
By Rob Stein, NPR | 09.30.2025
Scientists have created human eggs containing genes from adult skin cells, a step that someday could help women who are infertile or gay couples have babies with their own genes but would also raise difficult ethical, social and legal issues...