The Week in DNA: Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied
What if everything were sequenced? What if it happened today?
"Justice too long delayed is justice denied" — Martin Luther King Jr. in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
Holocaust survivor Jackie Young stands in front of a family tree. He was adopted and liberated from a Nazi camp by the Russians when he was three years old. You can listen to his story at WBUR.
A friend who likes to provoke sent me a naughty things sent me this story: “DNA testing is reuniting Holocaust survivors, families,”
It’s no secret that I’ve gotten in trouble for talking about World War II. If you read my critics — many of whom are foreign funded influence operations — you’d think that I was something of a devotee of Adolph Hitler who committed suicide so many years ago this week. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I am so very grateful that our country won World War II and I am so very proud that so many members of my family participated in that effort.
Alas, reading the rather masterly Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010) I think there’s so much we don’t know about who died and how, especially as the Iron Curtail descended upon much of Europe.
Fortunately the geopolitical rise of Eastern Europe affords us a great opportunity to give the dead the care, attention and yes, love they deserve.
I propose sequencing all the mass graves and all the refugees — living and dead.
Isn’t it about time?
Yes, it is.
(As you know my grandfather Carl Lundquist ran one of the larger Vietnamese resettlement program. I wonder how different history might have been had he had the modern genetics tools we increasingly take for granted.)
Naturally it makes me very pleased indeed that others are seeing this possibility.
I proposed doing this sort of sequencing project when lots of Holocaust survivors were still alive and was called a Holocaust denier. By making it a crime to study any topic you make justice impossible.
Could my smearing have been because there were lots of people lying about their past so that they could get money?
Well better later than never.
DNA Reunion Project is helping to reach survivors still alive and offer them free DNA kits. I approve of this project totally and enthusiastically—though I do wonder if it’s the wisest action to use Ancestry DNA for the testing.
Some choice lines from the story:
“A few years ago, Mendelsohn discovered her husband's 95-year-old grandmother, who survived the Holocaust, had family living in the U.S.”
“We just want people to understand that so many of these people believe they are all alone and they're really not," Mendelsohn said.”
"The Holocaust created many situations where people have no paper trail," Mendelsohn noted.
"Part of what the Holocaust did was just completely sever ties for families," Newman said. "We're looking for those smaller connections where people feel 'It's not just me in this world.'"
I’m a donor to Yad Vashem — the Holocaust museum in Israel. Wouldn’t it be nice if the Holocaust museum would use the latest in genetics to help the cause of reuniting families?
Wouldn’t it be nice if every Jew with ties to the Holocaust were sequenced?
Wouldn’t it it be nice if every Jew were sequenced?
Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone were sequenced?
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There are so many people who could use DNA to find some measure of justice.
Another friend I were talking recently about how many prisoners we suspect would be exonerated if only they had DNA testing.
There are so many people for whom DNA might be the ticket to their emancipation and not only because
Surely there are a number of people in jail who might be let lose as genetics continue to reveal underlying mental health considerations.
We don’t have to live like this.
What if every prisoner were sequenced? Is it a matter of cost? Let’s crowdfund it.
The victims of crime also deserve this sort of sequencing technology.
While it’s nice that New York State is building facilities to store rape kits but it should be incumbent upon them to solve the rapes.
New York State is taking steps to protect evidence for victims of sexual offenses. A new state facility will now store rape kits for up to twenty years, giving victims time to decide how they want to move forward.
“It’s a recognition that no one responds to trauma in the same way and we want to extend that long enough so that people can do it anytime that works for them,” said Elizabeth Cronin, Director of the NYS Office of Victim Services.
Waiting twenty years for justice shouldn’t be acceptable.
Let’s go.
Of course there’s another what if.
What if we sequenced all living things?
Researchers obtained DNA from all kinds of mammalian critters, like caribou, armadillos, bats, and bison. Their genetic menagerie eventually included 52 endangered species, like the giant otter and the Amazon river dolphin, as well as primates like chimps and humans.
"We're still only looking at a tiny portion of mammals, but it is the largest project we've ever done like this," says Elinor Karlsson, professor at the UMass Chan Medical School and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, who notes that 80 percent of the mammalian families are represented in their collection.
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The uniqueness of humans has long fascinated scientists, and researchers have compared human DNA to that of our close relative, chimpanzees, as well as other species to try to learn what sets the human brain apart.
Steven Reilly of the Yale School of Medicine says that he and his colleagues wanted to know what bits of foundational mammalian DNA had been lost in humans.
"We asked, what has been around across millions of years of evolution, and that if you look in a dolphin or you look at a dog or you look at a donkey, it's all there, but then suddenly in humans — poof! — we don't have it," explains Reilly.
They identified about 10,000 bits of DNA that exist in most other mammals but not humans, and most of these deletions occurred in parts of the genetic code that are thought to be in regulatory regions, where they can act like dimmer switches that turn the activity of other genes up or down.
Many of the human-specific deletions occurred near genes related to the development of the brain, says Reilly, but it wasn't clear which of them might actually be doing something.
So his group then did experiments in a wide range of cell types, to see which deletions could actually produce changes in gene activity. They found about 800 cases where the human version of the DNA produced a different outcome than the chimp version.
When they took a cell from a human nervous system and added a deleted bit of DNA back in, they could sometimes see wide-ranging effects. For example, they saw that the activity of one gene went down, and this had a cascading effect on the activity of around 30 other genes, ones that are associated with the formation of a kind of insulation around brain cells — a process called myelination. The brains of humans and chimps are known to differ markedly in the speed of this myelination (humans go slower).
…
He called it "almost a little humbling that we don't have a lot of new fancy bells and whistles to build a brain. It's largely using the same building blocks that go into making a chimp brain. Just in a slightly different way."
If you could find genetic variants which affect traits within the mammalian kingdom you can do it within the human race too.