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The Future of Crime-Fighting Is Family Tree Forensics

"A Message to Trump: Fund Background Checks and Public Health Research on Guns—Don’t Arm Teachers"

Author: Megan MolteniMegan Molteni
science 12.26.18 08:00 am


Former police officer Joseph James DeAngelo, accused of being the Golden
State Killer, stands in a Sacramento, Calif., jail court on May 29, 2018,
as a judge weighs how much information to release about his arrest.
DeAngelo is suspected in at least a dozen killings and roughly 50 rapes in
the 1970s and '80s.
Paul Kitagaki Jr./AP

In April, a citizen scientist named Barbara Rae-Venter used a little-known genealogy website called GEDMatch .. https://www.wired.com/story/police-will-crack-a-lot-more-cold-cases-with-dna/ .. to help investigators find a man they’d been looking for for nearly 40 years: The Golden State Killer .. https://www.wired.com/story/detectives-cracked-the-golden-state-killer-case-using-genetics/ . In the months since, law enforcement agencies across the country have flocked to the technique, arresting a flurry of more than 20 people tied to some of the most notorious cold cases of the last five decades. Far from being a forensic anomaly, genetic genealogy is quickly on its way to becoming a routine police procedure. At least one company has begun offering a full-service genetic genealogy shop to law enforcement clients. And Rae-Venter’s skills are in such high demand that she’s started teaching her secrets to some of the biggest police forces in the US, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Identifying individuals from their distant genetic relatives, a technique called long-range familial searching, is a potent alternative to the types of DNA searches commonly available to cops .. https://www.wired.com/2015/10/familial-dna-evidence-turns-innocent-people-into-crime-suspects/ . Those are typically limited to forensic databases, which can only identify close kin—a sibling, parent, or child—and are highly regulated. No court order is required to mine GEDMatch’s open source trove of potential leads, which, unlike forensic databases, contains genetic bits of code that can be tied to health data .. https://www.wired.com/story/to-protect-genetic-privacy-encrypt-your-dna/ .. and other personally identifiable information.

More - https://www.wired.com/story/the-future-of-crime-fighting-is-family-tree-forensics/

Posted specifically to, in "stashed March 1, 2018:"

What This Unprecedented 13-Million-Person Family Tree Reveals
For starters, the new tree calls into question a prevailing theory for why people stopped marrying close relatives.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/03/human-family-tree-genealogy-ancestry-dna-marriage-longevity-science/

Thirteen million degrees of Kevin Bacon: World's largest family tree shines light on life span, who marries whom
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/03/thirteen-million-degrees-kevin-bacon-world-s-largest-family-tree-shines-light-life-span

Crowdsourced family tree yields new insights about humanity
https://phys.org/news/2018-03-crowdsourced-family-tree-yields-insights.html

13 million people tracked over 300 years to build massive human family tree
Geneticists built a family tree linking millions of people across 300 years.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/03/giant-human-family-tree-traces-how-people-moved-and-married-over-300-years/

The 'Genome Hacker' Who Mapped a 13-Million-Person Family Tree
Huge crowdsourced genealogy databases are inspiring new genetics research.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/03/yaniv-erlich-genomes-pedigrees-myheritage/554441/

When Did Americans Stop Marrying Their Cousins? Ask the World’s Largest Family Tree
Researchers assembled 5 million family trees using data from the website Geni.com to test several genetic and historical hypotheses.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/01/science/cousins-marriage-family-tree.html

The 13 Million People in Your Family Tree
The effort captures 11 generations, based on 86 million public profiles from an online genealogy service
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-13-million-people-in-your-family-tree-1519930813

more: https://news.google.com/news/story/d9b65EgtQO_h8BM76yqYtcLXu7MKM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en