Your DNA Test Could Send a Relative to Jail
By Rafil Kroll-Zaidi,
The New York Times Magazine
| 12. 27. 2021
On any given day, CeCe Moore’s inbox is flooded with strangers asking her to solve the mysteries of life and death, and on a good day, she can. Over the past year, working from anonymous DNA samples, Moore helped identify the suspect in a murder by tracking old migration patterns from Poland to northern New Jersey; solved an assault case in which female DNA at the crime scene turned out to have been left not by the usual sort of explicable coincidence but by an actual female perpetrator; and made a key discovery in a murder investigation when the gravestone of an apparently childless woman was found to bear the inscription “MOTHER.” Some of these she knocked out in a few frenzied days. But there was also one cold case that had dogged her for close to two and a half years: the murder, in Gresham, Ore., of a woman named Barbara Tucker.
Moore is perhaps the most prominent figure in the field of genetic genealogy — the mapping and measuring of how relatives share DNA — which was developed...
Related Articles
By Pallab Gosh and Gwyndaf Hughes, BBC News | 06.26.2025
Work has begun on a controversial project to create the building blocks of human life from scratch, in what is believed to be a world first.
The research has been taboo until now because of concerns it could lead to...
Since the “CRISPR babies” scandal in 2018, no additional genetically modified babies are known to have been born. Now several techno-enthusiastic billionaires are setting up privately funded companies to genetically edit human embryos, with the explicit intention of creating genetically modified children.
Heritable genome editing remains prohibited by policies in the overwhelming majority of countries that have any relevant policy, and by a binding European treaty. Support for keeping it legally off limits is widespread, including among scientists...
By Ron Leuty, San Francisco Business Times | 06.16.2025
23andMe's two-step sale to a nonprofit led by former CEO Anne Wojcicki is nothing more than a dance around California's genetic privacy law, state Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a filing late Monday, one day before a judge will...
By Ed Cara, Gizmodo | 06.22.2025
In late May, several scientific organizations, including the International Society for Cell and Gene Therapy (ISCT), banded together to call for a 10-year moratorium on using CRISPR and related technologies to pursue human heritable germline editing. The declaration also outlined...