We mentioned GEDMatch, this nature of use genetics manuscript. And this is why we thought about it and we thought that there is this idea that you can, if you can find a second cousin or a third cousin or some distant relative of a person using GED matching. And if you have the surname, then we’ve a bit more identifies, you can really zoom in and get to the person.Īnd one of the suggestions when we talked with the NIH and other data custodians was, let’s just remove the Y chromosome and this will solve the problem, and we were like, doesn’t sound right, you start to remove pieces from the genome, and then we can maybe execute the attack with other pieces of the genome. And Previous to that study nature of genetics, we published another study in science where we show that you can infer the surname of individuals or males from the Y chromosome. One of the routes that we identified was to use genealogical triangulation. And the point was to create a taxonomy of different attacks so we can actually, when we talk about different things we know exactly where we are in this taxonomy and we can communicate between these different disciplines. We wanted to create kind of like for direct custodians, and just researchers that are interested in a domain, a summary of all the methods that we think could be used to reach genetic information and to learn or to infer some private things from this information. YE: Yeah, we had the paper this is like 2014 paper in Nature Reviews Genetics, where we mapped all the different strategies to breach genetic privacy. So enjoy the conversation and I’ll be back in a little bit. That’s what we first talk about in our discussion and then we transition into talking about his newer paper a bit later. Back in 2014, he and Arvind Narayanan from Princeton University, explored this issue and later were recognized by Science Magazine as the guys who really predicted what police would wind up using to track down criminals like the Golden State Killer. Genetic privacy is a subject that has always been a little near and dear to Yaniv. This is Yaniv Erlich, he’s an alumnus of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and he’s also the chief scientific officer of MyHeritage DNA.

I was able to catch up with one of the authors of that paper.

In our podcast, we talked a little about the privacy implications of searches like this and the paper follows those same lines, discussing who could be most likely to be implicated by these searches and, more importantly, mitigation strategies that companies and individuals can both take to protect everyone’s privacy. According to the authors, the purpose of the paper was really to see the power of what’s being called a “genomic triangulation” which is the same strategy that was used in an open-source genomic database to track down the Golden State Killer and has since been used to identify Jane and John Doe victims and people behind other violent crimes.

The name of that paper is “Identity Inference of Genomic Data Using Long-Range Familial Searches”. So just about a month after that episode aired, we’re talking now mid-October 2018, a new paper came out in the journal Science that talked a lot more about this subject. Now, that last episode, that was episode 17 which we called “Genomes, Justice and the Journey Here”–lot of alliteration going on–and in that episode, we talked a lot about what a lot of you have probably been thinking about, which is personal genetic testing services like 23 and Me or MyHeritage DNA. Now, I first wanted to thank everybody for their patience thus far, we’ve been on somewhat of a hiatus but this is one of those special episodes I mentioned at the very end of the last episode in Season 3.

Center for Humanities & History of Modern BiologyīS: Hey everybody, I’m Brian and this is Base Pairs, the podcast about the power of genetic information.

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