Days after the Newtown shootings of December 14, 2012, headlines trumpeted the state medical examiner’s request of University of Connecticut geneticists to examine mass murderer Adam Lanza’s DNA. What exactly that might entail wasn’t announced, but celebrity docs, geneticists, and bloggers weighed in, nearly all agreeing that (1) violent tendencies are due to complex interactions of many genetic and environmental factors and (2) probing Lanza’s DNA and finding anything even suggestive of causing his crime could lead to stigmatization of individuals who share suspect genome regions with him.
It appeared odd to me that several articles deemed any response to the sequencing of the killer’s DNA unlikely, because it would be a sample size of one. We do, in fact, have sources of criminals’ DNA. And they’re extensive.
View the original article here: Comparing Adam Lanza’s DNA to Forensic DNA Databases: A Modest Proposal
