Police Are Using DNA to Generate 3D Images of Suspects They've Never Seen

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkgma8/police-are-using-dna-to-generate-3d-images-of-suspects-theyve-never-seen

by tech-historian • 4 years ago

24 11 4 years ago

vice.com

tech-historian2• 4 years ago

When I saw Gattaca back in '97 I thought it was crazy. Now I'm not so sure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca

tracker1• 4 years ago

I didn't think it was so crazy at the time. I can absolutely see things heading in that direction over the next century.

LinuxBender• 4 years ago

This was also part of a campaign in 2014/2015 in HK to stop people from leaving chewing gum on bus stop benches. [1]

The Virginia-based company then used its Snapshot DNA Phenotyping Service to extract strands of DNA from the trash and identify the person's "sex, ancestry, pigmentation (skin color, hair color, eye color, freckling), and even face morphology." That information was then used to create some insanely creepy 3D renderings of what each litterbug looked like. Parabon created 27 facial composites using 24 DNA samples collected from Hong Kong's streets and 3 from volunteers.

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/roadwarriorvoices/2015...

tech-historian2• 4 years ago

This is crazy. Seems like a really bad sci-fi story if it wasn't true.

rolph• 4 years ago

DNA is only a blueprint, it exists along with epigenetic footnotes, and a noisy variation tolerant production process. add exosomatic contributions, during the course of development [ones lifetime] and you have a thing called phenotypic plasticity. this means multiple variations occur when using the same code but different system configurations.

This isnt quite like phrenology, but the mentation seems approximate.

atoav• 4 years ago

Putting people into the locker based on the shape of their head? Bad vibes.

yarg• 4 years ago

This isnt quite like phrenology, but the mentation seems approximate.

Really? Phrenology was utter bullshit - a methodology based on genetics can answer some questions correctly, and others within statistical bounds.

Incorporating understanding of epigenetics would improve the model, but the failure to do so does not invalidate the model completely.

As far as morphology is concerned, sex hormone levels are probably a significantly more important unconsidered factor.

giraffe_lady• 4 years ago

a methodology based on genetics can answer some questions correctly

Sure, but can this? Just because the underlying mechanisms have validity doesn't mean any specific practical application does.

just_steve_h• 4 years ago

There's a sucker born every minute, and there's an entire Valley full of con men waiting to pounce with grand claims of "AI" and "genetic breakthroughs". Many of the latter are congregated right here!

yuppie_scum• 4 years ago

And plenty of LEO’s will bite for it too

theGnuMe• 4 years ago

Well given a database of photos and DNA, you could probably do this with stable diffusion.

Police Are Using DNA to Generate 3D Images of Suspects They've Never Seen

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