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Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys has become the 22nd person, three of whom have gone on to become Nobel Peace Prize winners, to receive the award. He will receive the accolade on 14 April during the Edinburgh International Science Festival. DNA profiling is now a major tool in solving crime, and the standard method of resolving paternity disputes. The professor’s “eureka” moment came on the morning of 10 September 1984, when he went into his darkroom to develop an X-ray film from an... more

An international research team at the University of Edinburg just discovered that an inactive gene in patient’s brain might be the cause of severe mental disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression. The results show that gene ABCA13 plays a crucial role in brain health. More specifically, the gene is responsible for the way fat cells are processed inside the brain, a key element on which further research will be focused. Lead researcher Douglas Blackwood, professor of Psychiatric... more

T-Mobile UK experienced earlier this week a massive breach into its data base: a yet undisclosed number of customers records have been stolen and, most likely, sold to an unidentified third party. “The number of records involved runs into the millions and it appears that substantial amounts of money changed hands”, said in a document Britain’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) acknowledging the breach. The data included customers’ personal information and contract... more

Last week an every-day matter such as a Facebook status turned into something more: a rock-solid alibi. It happened to a 19-year-old Newyorker, who has been identified by a robbery witness during a police line-up. After a couple of weeks in jail, his attorney submitted his computer’s activity record to the court. His Facebook status was updated from his 12-miles-away home computer just one minute after the crime was committed. The case of course raised both eyebrows and approvals. The important... more

The issue with Government holding citizen’s DNA profiles is hot topic in the UK right now. Britain has in fact one of the largest DNA databases in the world, with profiles of over 5 million people, or 8 percent of the population. Police currently have the power to take DNA or fingerprints from anyone at the point of arrest and keep the information indefinitely — much longer than in many other countries. Last year the European Court ruled against this praxis labeling it as violation of human... more

The rules that regulate data storage vary around the world. A hot topic on the web. How long exactly data processing and storage companies have to keep them in their facilities before deleting them? This is an open issue not only to smaller data centers, but to big Internet players such as Google and Microsoft as well. While researching on this core topic for Swiss DNA Bank, I stumbled across a statement by Brad Smith, senior vice president for Microsoft, who claims that a major overhaul in the way... more

Privacy and security are two core issues at Swiss DNA Bank. This is why we organized the strongest data protection system available. But such a unique data collection and its Forever storage guarantee made us think very seriously about the possibility of making this data available to the world. Every time you create an event on your timeline you can choose if you want to keep it private, disclosed to selected people or make it accessible to the public. The amount of human experience that accumulates... more

Today’s big news in the DNA research field is the result of professor Renee Reijo Pera’s team at Stanford University: primitive human sperm and eggs and the germ cells that make them have been created from embryonic stem cells. Media has gone wild over the news, rating it anything in between the ultimate infertility treatment to artificial parent-less child manufacturing. Most scientists claim that this work is a way of getting closer to understanding what hides behind the miracle of a new human... more

The beginning of this week left many Americans stranded without any sidekick support. More specifically, I’m talking about T-Mobile’s phone data backup failure. “Sidekick” is a celebrity’s-pick telephone and e-mail device distributed by T-Mobile, brought to fame by a very-out-there advertising campaign which featured Paris Hilton, Snoop Dogg and other big celeb names. The data stored in these phones was actually remotely hosted by Microsoft’s servers, which means that users’ phonebooks,... more

As human genome sequencing becomes a hotter subject in today’s medical field, IBM just announced it will join the race to provide cheap DNA analysis. Many specialized labs, companies and universities have been working on the project for years, and IBM seems to be a bit behind in the game, but tech journalists have gone wild over the news: PC World says that IBM will “expand the life span of humans,” while the New York Times’ John Markoff predicts that the company will cut the cost of DNA... more