5 - Health and wealth, law and order: banking DNA against disease and crime

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In the 1990s, genetic databases moved into the mainstream, no longer limited to disease registers of affected families and other collections for specific research projects. The creation of large population-based collections of DNA samples linked to other information was supported by significant economic and political investment. This investment was driven by the promise that these new techno-scientific initiatives would deliver a variety of benefits for society, including economic competitiveness, improved public health, more effective law enforcement and greater security. In the field of criminal justice, forensic science organisations and police forces established DNA databases containing samples from offenders or suspects. In the medical realm, research institutions and governments created databases, more usually called biobanks, for the purposes of undertaking biomedical research. Until recently, forensic databases have not attracted particular attention from the media, public or social researchers, whereas biomedical databases have been seen by ethicists, politicians, policy advisors, lawyers and social scientists to give rise to many issues of public concern such that their formation has been the subject of intense scrutiny.

Some commentators have drawn comparison between the two scientific, technological and social arenas of law enforcement and biomedicine to highlight differences and incongruences between forensic and medical research databases and their governance. They point out, for example, that owing to a focus on concerns such as consent and privacy by those writing about biomedical databases, forensic databases have not received as much attention (Williams 2005; Levitt 2007).