Is it really feasible to “promote DNA database to effectively combat human trafficking”?

Recently, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference suggested "promoting the DNA database to effectively combat human trafficking." This suggestion instantly became a hot topic and became a hot topic among the public.

Trafficking has become the most serious topic at present. Previously, there was the suicide of Liu Mouzhou, a boy from Hebei who was "sunny, handsome and optimistic". Now there is the case of a woman in Fengxian County, Xuzhou, who gave birth to eight children. Behind trafficking is the loss of humanity and broken families. So how feasible is it to "promote DNA database to effectively fight against trafficking"?

First of all, I think it is not feasible. Why? Here are my thoughts.

01. Impossibility 1 - No legal authorization

Many people believe that collecting DNA is helpful in fighting human trafficking, but in reality it is not carried out. There are many factors to consider. The most realistic one is: there is no legal authorization.

The Ministry of Public Security once responded to the issue of DNA collection, pointing out that the core issue at present is the lack of legal authorization, and that the inclusion of DNA collection in household registration management requires legislation by the National People's Congress.

02. The second impracticality: technical issues

Even if legislation is passed, DNA collection still faces many problems, at least technical and social problems.

On the one hand, DNA collection requires professional equipment, and the collection site needs to be treated to prevent contamination. In addition, the transportation and storage of DNA is also an important issue. Under high temperature conditions, DNA will break, making the collection invalid.

On the other hand, how to deal with DNA after it is collected is a more complicated issue. Generally, we will test the DNA and extract its signature features, which is what we often call paternity testing. In this case, there are also requirements for the quality of the DNA, and even more requirements for the testing equipment and processing process. Too low a quantity or too low a quality can easily form a false signal. Once these are completed, the DNA information can be uploaded to the Internet.

Remember this sentence, this is the key. DNA is just a string of letters, which can be accessed online. This is a piece of DNA I have in my hand, in txt format.

03. The third impracticality: social issues

Let’s think about the problem of personal information leakage in recent years.

It is even certain that, under the current circumstances, once DNA is collected from the entire population, it is almost inevitable that it will be stolen and sold online.

At this point, another major problem will arise: a social problem. Human DNA is the basic information that determines human biological characteristics. In fact, whether it is your gender, blood type, or whether you have earlobes, single eyelids or double eyelids, these characteristics can be obtained from DNA. You can even get your age (epigenetic method), whether you have a certain genetic disease or whether you are prone to a certain disease (susceptibility) from DNA, etc. Some scientists even draw a person's appearance based on DNA information, which can achieve a certain degree of restoration. Basically, most of the physiological characteristics of people you can think of can be interpreted from DNA.

The DNA we extract carries all the genetic information. Human DNA is more than 3 billion base pairs long, but we only need about 100 to 80 base pairs (microsatellite fragments) to detect kinship.

In this case, how to protect our personal biological privacy from being leaked becomes a crucial issue.

04. Impossibility 4: Possible generation of new crimes

This may even lead to a new type of crime, where someone takes risks for profit and leaks DNA information. Then the door to the organ theft problem that everyone is concerned about will be directly opened. In the past, matching required finding someone and going to the hospital, but with DNA information, everyone can directly search for matching people.

What is more serious is that DNA information itself may be used by the enemy, who may design genetic weapons to target certain individuals or groups.

In the past two years, our country has seriously dealt with many cases of transferring Chinese genetic information abroad.

It can be seen that we currently do not have the ability to fully control DNA, a fundamental biological characteristic of human beings, so there are great risks in centralized collection.