If we could test every infant’s DNA at birth, we could predict what future diseases they might have and guard against them early–right? Wrong!
In the April 3rd edition of the New York Times, Gina Kolata quotes researcher Bert Vogelstein as saying, "The punch line is that this sort of personalized medicine will not in any way be the most important determinant of patient care."
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We’re relying more and more on DNA evidence to catch rapists and murderers, but there’s evidence that psychological bias plays a part in how this evidence is interpreted. Labs aren’t always as objective as we’d like them to be.
Recently, we’ve seen cases where DNA evidence freed innocent people from prisons, but sometimes, contaminated DNA evidence causes police to create a perpetrator in their minds who doesn’t really exist. This happened in Germany in 2007, when some contaminated swabs caused them to search for–as Vaughan Bell writes in the Observer–an "invincible, transsexual, border-hopping serial killer just to keep the story coherent with the genetic evidence."
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Something very profound has happened. The existence of Sasquatch has been confirmed by a DNA study that appears to have been carried out at a high level of scientific competence. It isn’t simply a matter of us having discovered a new species on the Earth. What has been discovered is an intelligent species that is living in a way that is precisely the opposite of the way we live. The potential for a whole new kind of relationship therefore exists, and for both species the chance of embarking on a new journey that is far richer than the ones we have thus far pursued.
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When it comes to war, guns and tanks (and even drones?) may soon be a thing of the past. Modern warfare (NOTE: Subscribers can still listen to this show) will use germs and DNA.
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