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The article points to cases especially where mixed or degraded samples can be interpreted incorrectly as the technician is forced to make a judgement call. Thi
by readams 10y ago
The article points to cases especially where mixed or degraded samples can be interpreted incorrectly as the technician is forced to make a judgement call. This actually seems amenable to statistical analysis to me however, so I'm wondering why that doesn't happen here. You should still be able to assign probabilities based on the evidence.
Perhaps they still present things like 60% or 40% chance of match to the jury and they just hear "DNA match" and tune out the rest. I've said this before but I'm beginning to suspect that along with a public defender there should be a public forensic scientist assigned to defendants.
- jcoffland 10y agoYou may not have read the whole article. It discusses specifically software which employs statistical analysis of DNA sample data.
- new299 10y agoIt is to be frank crazy that we're talking about anything less that a 99.9% match with today's technology. We have platforms that for less that 1000USD can sequence (read) a complete human genome. Each individual has millions of mutations which make them unique. Each position is read with >99% accuracy. Just to make sure in general each position is read >20 times. For forensics it would be like comparing two very long strings for (very nearly) exact identity. The only reason we use techniques like DNA fingerprinting is because that's what was feasible in the 1980s and forensics is an extremely conservative discipline.