Genetic ancestry tests can be misused. In 2008, George Church, Harvard geneticist and founder of the Personal Genome Project, told the Wall Street Journal:: “I would be shocked if Americans and people in other countries don’t want this type of [medical genetic] data.” Little did he suspect that politicians might co-opt screening tests to “prove” their “racial stock”. In the last few years, a Turkish politician demanded that their President take a genetic test to “prove” that he is not Armenian, French authorities were accused of genetic discrimination against Roma, and several right-wing European politicks made genetic claims about Africans, Basques and Jews. And now an extremist Hungarian member of parliament is misusing genetic data to “prove” that his ancestry is neither Jewish nor Roma.
View the original article here: Genetic purity tests for politicians
Additional Resources:
- Genome test slammed for assessing racial purity, Nature
- Genetic testing of far right Hungarian politician provokes an uproar, Foreign Policy
- European testing for racial purity, Science 2.0
