It's been so hot outside.
Man, what I was not ready for the summer. It went straight from cold wintertime to ninety five degrees one hundred percent humidity.
And when you feel like that, once you get past the pollen part.
It's hard for me to get past the fallen part.
The immediate feeling is like, it feels just like that Donald Glover song. It sounds like summer. Yeah, and it's like family reunion and real hot dogs. It's crispy. I want a burnt one. I love it. Summer is family reunion time. It is. I haven't been to a family reunion in a couple of years. I didn't go to
the last one. The one before that. My family came to DC, and so you've been everybody that's in my family that listens, know, you've been calling us country and so all those country folks when we're in DC having a good time, I believe.
That you all are southern and not country.
I don't want to no, that's because somebody corrected you on Instagram. That's because someone corrected you on Instagram.
So you said country, I say.
Southern, Southern. What I want to know is this summer, are people going to switch from Frankie Beverly a maze before I let go to Beyonce, before I let go. Are the old people gonna let us do it? Okay?
So one thing that we know is that old folks love a line dance. Yes, so especially one with instructions. You don't have to memorize, you just exactly. Beyonce tells us exactly what to do, and old people love that, so they got they gotta switch over.
I hope my mom is listening. She loves line.
Dancing, she does, and she is one of the young people that love them. You remember that time we were line dancing in your house?
Yes in North Carolina? Yes, child. We were working up a sweat.
Missus Wattley was outstepping all of us.
Man, you're gonna twist your ankle trying to keep up. Don't do it. I'm t T and I'm Zachiah.
And from Spotify Studios. This is Dope Labs.
I think one of my favorite things about family reunions is just seeing how alike everybody is. Like my mom and one of her first cousins, they look just alike. Do you feel like you look like somebody in your family?
Everyone tells me that I look just like my father's mom. They're saying that, it's like uncanny is crazy, genetics is a weird thing, because I'm like, how when you know I have a whole other side of my family, how do I look just like right, hurt and not like anybody else.
It's really interesting because when everyone's together, you start looking at things and noticing things that you never noticed before. And so I have like a second cousin. And people say, oh, y'all look so much alike, and I'm like, that's my that's a distance. It's a second cousin, you know, versus me and my mom or me and my dad. Someone saying that we look just alike.
Right, I know, me and all my sisters have the same pinky toe? What same exact pinky toe?
What is it? I don't need you don't even want to know.
It's not like what it was not cute?
But aren't those things like so strange? Yeah?
And we get it from our mom because our mom has the same pinky toe.
And how come nobody got your dad pinky toe? Have you even seen your dad's pinky toe? I've seen it. I don't want to he wears sampals. Yeah, and so it's like all these things, Like I feel like the family reunions turn everybody into like a genealogist or honestly, a forensic detective. You're like, hey, all of us got this pinky toe, then somebody else come along you like, you don't have that pinkye to see a pinky Are you really in the family right now? You got the mall.
If you follow the key on Instagram, you see that she has a mole right above her mouth.
It's beautiful. It's my reset button.
Yes, it's her reset button, her power up button, all the button. Anytime Zakia needs anything, she could press that that mole and she'll get it. Where does the mole come from? It's so distinct.
I think I'm only one with a mole. But I think my mom and her brothers have like soft, curly hair, Okay. And then I went natural and I was like, hey, my hair is coarse. It's about a four C. And I asked my dad. He was my dad's bald now so conveniently, He's like, no, no, no, I have waves. I have waves. I never heard my hair is not like that. And I'm like, hey, playboy, either your hair was like that or you're not my father or you
are not the father. So yeah, I feel like, now you don't have to look and see does this person belong Do they look like Aunt Carol? Do they look like Uncle Joe? Yes? Or no? Right, you't gotta ask those questions because there's for ninety nine dollars and sometimes less, you can get a commercial DNA test.
Yeah, like ancestry dot com twenty.
Three and meters.
Yeah, my heritage family tree DNA and delicious goes on and on and on.
Hey, people get these results back, and I think the family re unions this year are gonna be spicy, y'all eating chicken a corporate and they're like uncle Billy, it says, I'm not this. Hey, nobody told them they want. They
want answers questions that need answers. I don't know how people decide like, yes, I want to do a genetic test, and then beyond the genetic test, the people that put them into those genealogy databases to find more people like I understand the thirst for that information, but I'm also like, aren't you a little bit nervous about that?
I'm nervous about all that stuff, which is why I have not done that. Yeah, I feel confidence that I know for the most part where I'm from, and so I just I'm just sticking with that. If it's something different, it's gonna have to be different.
I'm from North Carolina, and I think that's good enough for me. I'm from North Carolina and it's human and that's all I need to end to. Bugs are the size of your head.
That's all you need to know about North Carolina.
But you know, that really brings up a good point, Like you were saying, I don't really know how it works, And somebody asked us about that on our Instagram lot. Yeah, somebody asked us a question. They said, have y'all done like twenty three and meters or ancestry testing?
Yeah, one of those commercial genetic testing.
Yeah, And they're like, have you done a commercial genetic test or direct to consumer genetic test? And what do you think about it? Guess what we're answering your question today.
So today we're talking about genetic.
Testing, specifically direct to consumer genetic testing and how that information is being used. All right, let's get into the recitation. What do we know and what do we want to know?
So there has been a huge boom in the amount of people who are doing these genetic tests.
In twenty seventeen, almost four point five million people did direct to consumer genetic testing, and.
In twenty eighteen that number almost tripled.
And by the beginning of this year, more than twenty six million people have added their DNA to one of the main ancestry or health databases. Honestly, it's everywhere. Everybody's doing it. I heard somebody who was using these tests for dogs. But what do you need to know about your dog? Let's think about my dog, Daisy. Oh, I love Daisy.
Daisy is a Chihuahua and she's very chihuaha in, but she's part human too. Sometimes I do think Daisy is a human. She definitely sleeps under the covers like a human with her head on the pillow.
See, and now you are a person that wants to get a DNA kit for your dog, going to get a DNA kit. Folks are using these DNA kits to not only find out their ancestry, but they're also using them to find out if they have any type of diseases in their families and any type of genetic things that they need to be aware of. Right, So, looking at risk profile. You know, do you have this certain gene If you do, what does that mean for your risk of manifesting a certain disease later?
So when you get your results back, for most people, the buck stops there. They're not doing anything else. Nice to know that I'm fourteen percent Scandinavian. But some people take it one step further. Some people are using this information and putting it into some of these open source databases that are separate from the direct consumer companies, but they're using them to kind of make a genealogy tree
or find long lost or distant relatives. So they're looking for other people who have genetic profiles that are similar to theirs. And in some cases when they do that, police are using that information to find the distant relatives of yours that have committed crimes, like the Golden State killer. That was the cold case that had been unsolved for decades, but then the police were able to find a DNA match.
It's crazy, but also great that they have a suspect after all these years. You know, So how do we weigh those things? And who, like you said, who's doing the weighing? Do the rules change? Are there any rules?
Right, Now we're going to get into that a little later in the show, But first, there's a lot of things I need to know about these kits. I have no idea like how a lot of this stuff works. So that's what I want to start the dissection with. I want to start with the very very basics.
So you want to know what genetic information they're looking at in these tests?
No, Like I want to know, like what is DNA, what is a chromosome?
What is a genie?
And then like how these kits work. How do they get all of that information from a bunch of spit.
So from the spit of to the kidda, Yeah, I like that. My questions are more around kind of information and the disclosure of information. So if you have this genetic information and not even just information, if you have the sample, what are you doing with all that spit? Do you use it all in the process when you're collecting the DNA? Then when you actually get those test results back, does the company keep a copy of it
as well? Like do you get a copy and then they keep a copy or you get a copy and they burn it after reading? I have questions about that this message will self destruct right right, is it like mission impossible? But then I think my other question is, even though there are these privacy concerns and there you know, for some of these companies they say we do not share information with anybody, is there any clause that allows
that to change. Is it possible that they don't share now but they will later in the terms and conditions? Because you know, I don't read this though, I don't ever roll to the bottom, click the button, clickick.
Except and go about my life.
I acknowledge I have read this, but I have not. I have not read a single word. So before we get to the dissection, we want to hear from you. What do you guys think about these at home DNA kids. Have you done a genetic test?
No?
I did not have not just not interested. I don't trust it.
I don't think you can just swab my spent and tell me where my ancestors came from.
It just doesn't make sense to me. Have you ever done any genetic testing before? But maybe somebody did it on me, but I don't know.
I think there's also a little bit of concern that I have around data privacy and how data is being stored and shared. So that would definitely be something I would need to look into if I were to like try it.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, uh huh yeah.
Oh, could you tell us a little bit about what motivated you to do this.
I'm from Japan, and in Japan, like there is a discussion that you know, how pure Japanese you are. Yeah, so I was curious about like signing up by myself, like if I believe I'm not, so, you know, I wanted to find out.
So let's get into the dissection. And today the dissection is going to be a little bit different because we're going to tackle the dissection in this lab in two parts. For the first half, we're going to be using my friend and favorite person as our expert, because Zakiya, she is an expert on all things DNA. Your PhD is in genetics, right, and so I'm going to draw on your expertise to explain a lot of this stuff, no problem.
And then in the second part, we're going to be talking to a lawyer who specializes in forensic science, and they can talk more about the bigger questions around the information from these kits and how they're used.
Right, They're going to help us understand some of the ethical, legal, and social implications of this.
Right, So run me through how these commercial kits actually work. So first, you send in a bunch of spit with DNA in it, right.
I think one of the common misconceptions is that inherently that there's DNA in your spit. What's happening is your cheek cells. Your cheeks are constantly shedding, right Ooh, I know that seems really gross, little asmr. Your cheeks are constantly shedding, and so those cells that are coming off of the cheek, the inside of the cheek, those have DNA in them. And so what you're doing is getting those cells that are in the spit and you're getting the DNA out of the cheek cells.
So let's start with the very basics, because this is what I need. Okay, I know DNA, I know chromosome.
I'm feeling pretty proud.
Don't get your hopes up. And I know gene. But what I don't understand is how those three things interact with each other or like, what's the difference. Oh okay, I felt some judgment in that.
Oh well, I think these are great leaps and bounds because you used to only tell me that the mitochondria was the powerhouse of the cell.
So it is I remember that from biology.
I'm feeling good about what you know so far. Thank you, thank you, if you know any of those words. I think we're off to a good start, right. So if we think about our cells, everything in your body is made up of a cell, and these cells replicate. The way they're able to replicate and the way they're able to function is that they have instructions in them, and
those instructions are stored in the form of DNA. But there's so much genetic information, and so in order for it to all fit into a cell, it is really condensed. It's packed and wound on top of itself. And in that formation that DNA that's wound up and really tightly packed, those are chromosomes. So chromosomes are tightly wound DNA. Yeah, that's it.
And soh how do these things translate into.
Like TT as you present? Yeah, so this beautiful face. So each cell has different areas of the DNA that get turned on or turned off. And those areas those little pieces of DNA that correlate to like make more sugar or do this and that. Those are genes. So along the chromosome, right, which is that tightly wound DNA. There are regions that encode for special functions for each cell.
And so even though every cell in your body has the same information, they appear differently because different genes are turned on and off, so different parts of that chromosome are being expressed in let's say a cell that is in your gut compared to like a cell this in your eyeball.
This is very complex, but the way that you're explaining it makes a lot of sense.
So each cell has the same twenty three chromosomes in it, and those chromosomes all have differ different genes on them, but the collective term for all twenty three of those chromosomes is a genome, okay, And so when you hear people mention like, oh, a human genome, they're they're talking
about all of the chromosomes that person has. And so when we talk about the human genome, the human genome is just if you are of the species Homo sapien sapiens, this is your genome, right, But like bird, a specific bird, it has a different genome, so you can't. So that's also a thing people have to understand, Like each species has its own set genome, so we have a reference genome that's come out of a lot of work that
scientists have done to understand what's on each chromosome. So all of our genomes are the same roughly, And I think this is something that people don't really realize. If you are a human, you share roughly ninety nine point nine eight percent of your DNA with other everybody else, Wow, there is very little variation. We're not so different. Well, I'm feeling really optimistic because that means I share about ninety nine point ninety eight percent of by DNA with Beyonce.
And so I think, you know, when we think about these genetic tests, what they're looking at are areas where there tends to be variation.
So that point two percent that's left over, that's the variable part.
And in that.
Variable part, that's where you have genes that make you distinct from someone else. And so they're saying, is there somebody else with a similar profile or are there groups of people that have similar profiles? And that's how they say, Okay, you share ancestry or this percentage of whatever versus you know, thirty.
Percent of this, And so that's how they're creating these profiles.
Okay, let's take a break, and when we get back, we're bringing in someone who can help us break down why this is so important and what you need to know before doing one of those kids yourself. We're back, and so in the first part of the dissection, Zakia, you really laid out the basics of DNA and how these kids actually work.
Right, and so now we're going to talk about how that information is being used and to help us, we recruited Aaron Murphy.
I'm Aaron Murphy. I'm a professor at NYU School of Law. I'm the author of Inside the Cell, The Dark Side of DNA, and I've written and researched DNA issues for a couple of decades.
Now. Aaron's work shines a light on how DNA is being used and who is using it.
A perfect example of this is in the Golden State Killer case.
I read that book and I was not sleeping for weeks. Okay, I I think I hear something in the house.
That you also do that when there is a bug in your house.
Yes, equally scary. You guys have to check out the book I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara. I'm gonna put a link in the show notes and hit us on Twitter.
Let's read along, let's read together. Let's read it together. Like we'll be like, okay, read up the page whatever. It'll be like being back in high school again.
Yeah, being a book club. I think it'll be really good.
And folks, some folks wasn't reading the book. But I trust that you all will read this book.
Yeah.
Read the book clubs is when folks show up and they haven't read what they were supposed to read. And then you're like, so, then how are we supposed to have a book club?
Just eat the snacks. Just eat the snacks, and these.
Are virtual snacks. It costs us nothing, Okay, So let's get back to this case.
So they were there was a string of murders and rapes and burglaries in California and that was in the seventies and eighties, and the police could not figure it out.
They did have a DNA sample from one of the crime scenes.
So law enforcement took the Golden State Killers DNA from a crime scene and ran it through their database.
But when they tried to find a match in the ordinary criminal justice databases, over time they never found a match.
So then you fast forward to twenty eighteen and the use of these directed consumer DNA kits has completely blown up, and there's a growing interest in using these online databases to try and make connections to unsolved cold cases using genetic material.
And there's a site in particular called jed match.
And if you're trying to do your googles, that's ged match.
And that's a site where people who participate in online recreational DNA testing sites like twenty three and meters or ancestry, when they do those tests, they usually have to kind of stay within the walls of the service. And so if you send your genetic information to ancestry dot com and you're trying to find relatives and then some relatives sends their information to twenty three and meter, you won't find each other because you're both in separate consumer commercial databases.
So a person in Florida kind of invented this idea of a site where you could sort of upload what you got from one of these commercial testers, and the idea would be to allow you to break down those walls so that people could find each other a across different commercial platforms.
So law enforcement uses a DNA from the Golden State killer crime scene to create a profile, and.
They did find a distant relative on jed match.
So when they got back a match, they thought, well, if this person is in fact related to our perpetrator, they're pretty distantly related. They're like a third cousin or so. So they built an entire family tree from that sample.
And that led them to their suspect, a former police officer in California named Joseph James DiAngelo. They got some of DiAngelo's DNA and we'll talk about how that could have happened in a little bit, and he ultimately proved to be a match.
So let's look at some of the reasons why they found a DNA match after all those years and why they couldn't find a match back in the day.
Well, first, it's because there was a wider pool of people on jed match. The law enforcement databases police for using decades ago only had convicted and arrested people in it. Jedmatch is an open source platform where anyone can upload their information.
And the second reason is because the genetic information people upload into jed match from their commercial kits is a lot more informative. A lot of people assume all DNA testing is the same, but it's not.
Okay, So there are two different types of DNA testing that we're going to talk about today, and they're very different. There are STRs and SMPS or snips.
The information you can get from STRs is like what you could get off of somebody, learn about somebody by looking at their driver's license. The information you get from snips is what you could learn about somebody by looking at their phone.
The law enforcement databases used to try to find the Golden State killer back in the day, those only really had information that was from STR testing. But the commercial genetic kits people are using today those are snips.
Yeah, and that analogy Aaron used makes me nervous because I don't want people looking at my phone. It's like that Drake song, you know, when Drake first came out and he had that freestyle. He's like, if you find my BlackBerry with the side scroll, sell that to any Rappid that I know. That's basically what it is for me. You find my phone, you got the keys to the castle.
So let's start with STRs. Why did legislators decide to use STR testing for criminal justice databases.
One thing to understand is that when forensic DNA typing came on the scene, legislators and criminal justice officials made this very conscious choice to choose parts of the genome that were highly variable, so they're different among people but essentially meaningless.
Yeah, they might have had your phone, but it was like a rotary phone.
It was just looking at areas of the genome where we know there are these sequences that everyone has, and they just repeat different numbers of time and different people.
Also, with str testing, the range of how far back you can find relatives is limited. It really only allows you to identify parents or full siblings, but you probably wouldn't identify a correlation with say, aunts and uncles, and definitely not second or third cousins. SNIP testing, on the other hand, is very different.
SNIP testing can get you someone's third cousin. It can get you genetic connectedness between people who in our social worlds probably don't know they're related. I sometimes like to point out that the person who was the link to the goal than state killer probably read the newspaper about that arrest with the same sense of surprise as everybody else, because they probably don't know their third cousin.
Snips tell you everything. They're saying, this is how many phones, this is how many pictures you have, This how many selfies you have. This is what you like to look at at night. This is what you like to listen to before you go to sleep. Like it's telling you everything.
It's like Spotify, you know how those playlists know your exact mood and what you have for breakfast.
That's what a snip is.
Snip testing far more implicates privacy than this other form.
It's a very very.
Different kind of testing, and I think it's a really important difference to understand in judging whether this is a method we should use or not.
And they have several other applications aside from these kids. Snips are used in biomedical research and in the pharmaceutical industry. One example of the technology that can be developed using snip data is Crisper and this is a really popular gene editing technology that's been in the news lately.
So that means that for these commercial testing kits, which have SNIP information from all their consumers, that could be pretty valuable. Right.
People assume that the model of the business is one that's about commercial kit testing. You know, oh, twenty three and meters makes its money from my ninety nine dollars kit, but we know that that's not true. In fact, they discount those kits to subsidize the real model of the business, which is, you know, research, precision medicine, et cetera. What they're doing is selling data, genetic data and using genetic data for research. That's what makes them money, not your kit.
This is something that I always tell people. Sometimes you might think that you're paying for a service, but sometimes you are the product, right like people are selling like people say, oh, only pay five dollars. And then I got you know, my dad was telling me about an app where he could get fifteen cent off for gas for forever, and I said, hey, you know why it's so cheap, because you are the product they're selling, your information as a consumer.
Just DNA labs alone is like a one billion dollar industry if you really put it together, all the different applications and research, it's way more than that. And what that tells me is there are peopleeople who think this is really valuable stuff. Right, you would not have entire industries forming around understanding the genome, understanding what we can learn from it, understanding how to edit it to improve health outcomes, et cetera. If we didn't think those things were possible.
Yeah, I think it's exciting to learn more about where you're from and who you are and how you're related to this person or that person. But I think there needs to be a little more marketing about the other side of the coin, you know, which is the collection of biomedical information and how it informs different types of
decisions and policy and health care. So I think if we have to really consider not just like what am I getting from this information today, but what else can be done with this information later?
Putting your DNA out there is like when you squeeze the toothpaste out of the two. You can't put that toothpaste back in.
Nope, it's not going back.
Once it's out there is out there. Might as well bush your teeth, And.
That's just assuming that all you can do is brush your teeth. We don't know what they're going to do with toothpaste in the future.
We still don't have a firm grip on what exact role genomics play, but billions of dollars are being spent right now to figure that out, and so I think when people think about, well, what's the impact of sharing my genetic information, it's really important to remember this is incredibly valuable stuff. People really want to know what's in
the genome and what we can do with it. And the decision I'm making today may not be changeable in twenty years, thirty years, fifty years, when some of the money that's being spent right now actually starts to dividends in the form of much more concrete information about genetic predispositions and so forth.
And as we learn with the Golden State killer case, access to this information isn't just valuable to commercial genetic testing companies, it's also really valuable to the police who are using these open source databases to solve cold cases, eyes not cases, lukewarm.
Cases, all of that.
I just feel like I just found out that I own lakefront property in the south of France.
We're sit on the gold line. We got to protect it, that's right. I feel like now that we kind of have brought everybody up to speed, we're all thinking about how valuable our genetic information is. Let's go back to the criminal justice system and how DNA is being used there I want to know everything, like could police have my genetic information? And if they do, when did they get it, how did they get it.
There are a couple different ways that law enforcement got DNA now, both visible and invisible. So the most visible way that they collect DNA is that if a person's been convicted of a crime. In every state there are convicted offender DNA registries, and that means that just as a byproduct of that conviction, you're required to give your DNA to the state and they put that DNA profile into a database.
As for non criminals, sometimes law enforcement will just ask people for their DNA to help them find a suspected crim and some people are happy to help, but a lot of people might feel like they're being coerced. I know I would feel that way.
We've also seen in some places prosecutors using DNA samples or DNA profiles as a way to sort of trade leniency in their treatment of cases. So they can say, you know, I'll drop this drug possession case if you give me a DNA sample for the database, or i'll mark you know, your charge down if you give me a DNA sample for the database. And courts, by and large allow that.
So those are visible ways, and in all those scenarios, people know that their DNA is being taken, even if they're not happy about it. But there are other ways too.
Right now, there's really no prohibition on what's called sarptitious sampling, and this is the idea that anything you discard that has your genetic or biological material on it can be seized by law enforcement and type.
So basically you don't even need to commit a crime for police to snag your DNA, and they aren't required to report how many samples they have, so they might have mine and they might have yours.
We don't know. And it's especially complicated because we leave a trail of DNA around us everywhere we go. You touch a doorknob, you're leaving fingerprints behind. You didn't exfoliate, you didn't wash your legs, well, you're shedding legs, skin cells as you walk.
There, you go, your DNA is right there there, coming right for the picking.
And I think that's one of the concerns again about this genetic genealogy, is that it strongly incentivizes this kind of syruptitious collecting because as you're building out these family trees, if you come to a stumbling block, one solution might be just to test even if you know this is
not the actual suspect of the perpetrator. One way to overcome that stumbling block might be just to collect surreptitious samples from the kind of last person you had to try to get closer to your actual perpetrator.
So when you pair an open source database with the ability to surreptitiously or secretly collect DNA samples, suddenly police have way more avenues to find potential criminals. That could have been how they got the DNA sample for the Golden State killer suspect. Maybe they followed him into a jama juice or picked up a used cut a straw, used straw or something like that, and now he's in jail.
And because commercial genetic testing and these open source genealogy databases have become so popular so quickly, the courts are kind of racing to catch up. There aren't a lot of protections currently in place.
A good precedent, though, is smartphones.
So just to give one example, there's a big Supreme Court case about searching cell phones. And we used to have this general idea that if police like arrest you or lawfully sees you. They can kind of seize your stuff, they can look, they can pat you down. And it was largely motivated by like a safety rationale. You know, if you're gonna seize someone, you might want to make sure they don't have a weapon in their bag or
what have you. And so the Supreme Court in that case said, no, you know, they have to have a reason to search your cell phone and permission from a court to do it.
And that was a point that came up in the Jesse Smolllett case, like people were saying, why do and he turned over his phone and show police, you know who he was communicating with, but there's a lot of stuff in the phone. We didn't really have a law for that. Like we have to develop these laws as we learn more about these technologies.
And that kind of I think understanding of the differences that technology can make and the ways in which privacy can be much more compromised now because of that technology than in the past is what we need for DNA. We just haven't had it yet, a sort of recogning with the biological cell, not just the mobile cell.
And while there are some regulations in place for how police can use their own law enforcement databases. There are little to no regulations in place for how information from the open source databases can be used.
These commercial companies in general have some you know, protections for privacy, et cetera, and how they're going to use the data in place, but it's very voluntary and it's it's really not that binding to the extent that it might conceivably be binding. You can't really imagine much by way of enforcement of those agreements.
People always shock when I tell them, like, I know, I haven't done one of these tests, but it's because of the scary factor, right of the unknown of what's going to happen in the future. But if there were laws in place to protect your genetic information, it might be different. Because it is interesting, right, people should feel free to go out and get these tests done to learn more about themselves and you know, their ancestry. They shouldn't be worried about.
Their DNA being used in ways that they aren't aware of or haven't approved of.
I don't think you should have to choose between those really legitimate reasons to want to do this and genetic transparency for the rest of your life, you know, I think you should be able to participate in this kind of you know, recreational genetics without not just bartering away your genetic privacy, but the genetic privacy of your children, their children, all your relatives that you know and all the relatives you don't know.
You need to tell your auntie that's out here telling everybody to do a DNA kit, say you know, I love you, but here are some things we should be thinking about. Right, did you read the fine print before you send in all that spit? I think it's important for people to start to start knowing because I can really see there being a turning tide where we're going from T shirts they have the family names on them to DNA kids with the family name on them as
your party favorite for the family reunion. Let's just think it through before we do that.
So that was a lot of information to take in, not just a lot of information, a lot of scary information.
And the point is not to scare, right, but to raise awareness. I think that's what we really want to do. Yeah, do you feel like you understand now how all these things go together?
I definitely understand a lot more and I feel more informed. Like if somebody were to say, oh, do you want to do this ancestry test, that I would be like, Okay, well, let me read a lot more about whatever company it is who I'm planning on submitting saliva too.
I think it's important. I think one of the major takeaways is that not all companies are created equal, and those terms and conditions do vary. So I guess we got to start looking at that. Yeah, and then even after you get your results, what you do next really can have a major impact, right, not just on you, but everybody else in your family.
And you have to think that way because it's way bigger than you. Just like when you get your results back and you realize, oh, I have all of this family from all these different places. It is bigger than you, and you should like really hone in on that fact is that this is affecting way more than just yourself.
I've just been thinking about the collection of DNA and how you get added to a database, like you know, we just briefly mentioned, you know, law enforcement might ask people for their DNA to get them off, like you don't get this so that in exchange for a lower
a lighter sentence for something. It could be something that you didn't even do so if I've really been thinking about this episode in the context of when they see us, which just came out, and I just think about those boys in that room and being alone, being nervous, being scared. If they say we want to swab, you want to get your DNA, You're gonna probably say yeah, right.
Because you think if you say no, then it's like, does that mean that they're gonna think that I'm trying to hide something that are guilty or something that I didn't do.
And that's just it's just not the case.
And I'm sure that there are going to be some people who are thinking, well, don't we want to catch like people who commit crimes, like we should all be giving up our DNA for that. But just because of a DNA match does not mean that you are automatically guilty.
Aaron told us a story about a man who was in an ambulance and later on that day, another person was in that ambulance, a victim of a crime, and they swabbed that victim for DNA, and the man who was previously in that ambulance, his DNA was on that person.
I think they arrested him, and so I think there's that component of it, that there's the on the one hand, we know that when there's always when there's a DNA match, it doesn't mean that someone is the perpetrator of a crime. But on the other hand, is that the collection of DNA for the purposes of figuring out or excluding people from crimes doesn't mean that's the only use of that information. And I think that's the terrible part. It doesn't stop there.
It doesn't stop there. It's not like, Okay, I'm here to help you with this one case and the buck stops here. No. Now, I can take your DNA and I can do a familial search when there's something else that happens. And I don't think that people are aware of how this one small action ripples through for them forever, right, and not just affects them, but affects the people that they know and love, and even distant relatives who they might not know or love.
Right, and then their children and your children children's children.
So people you can't even make a decision about, depending on where you are in life.
People who don't even exist right now.
Yeah, Wow, that's really real. For more on today's episode, check out our cheat sheet and show notes at Dope Labs podcasts dot com.
And remember the phone lines are always open. You can leave us a question or comment or text us. Our number is two zero two five six seven seven zero two eight. That's two zero two five six seven seven zero two eight.
You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at Dope Laps podcast. Tt is on Twitter and Instagram at dr Underscore t Sho.
And you can find Zakia on Twitter and Instagram at z Said So.
And if you do love the show, don't forget to follow us on Spotify or wherever else you listen to your podcast special thanks to Erin Murphy, our guests for today's episode. You can learn more about her work and find a link to her book in our show notes. Our producer is Jenny Rattle at MAAST. Mixing and sound design by Hannes Brown.
Original theme music by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex sugi Ura. Additional music by Elijah Lex Harvey. Shout out to Hope Jackson, our new intern. We are so excited to have you a part of the Dope Labs crew.
That's right. Welcome aboard. Dope Labs is brought to you by three M and is a production of Spotify Studios and Mega Owned Media Group, and is executive produced by us T. T. Shadia and Zakiah Wattley. So basically, all the chromosomes in ourselves are just mixing matches of pieces of DNA that we get from our parents.
So it's like I have my mother's smile for my father's teeth.
I think that's quite an oversimplification, but for illustrative purposes, I will allow it