Gene Swipe: Few DNA Labs Know Whether Chromosomes Are Yours or If You Stole Them
Private detective Rocky Pipkin is a DNA thief and proud of it. Someone was sending bomb threats to one of his clients, a big manufacturing company in Fresno, Calif. But Pipkin soon figured out how to break the case. He took the mailed threat and brought it to a DNA lab, which discovered that the culprit had accidentally sneezed on one of the letters.
But that was only one piece of the puzzle. Pipkin needed more. Believing the threats to be an inside job, Pipkin invited a bunch of the company’s security guards to a meeting at his office, supplying them soda to drink there.
After the meeting concluded, Pipkin fished out the soda cans from the trash and sent them to the same lab, which identified a DNA match from the saliva in the cans to the sneezed-on letter. The discovery eventually led Pipkin to put two and two together: A guard employed by the manufacturing company was sending bomb threats in hopes of gaining overtime pay.
“We decided that it was perfectly legal and no invasion of privacy to seize those cans from the trash, even though the suspects had no idea we were collecting their DNA,” says Pipkin.
As scientists around the world continue to make breakthrough discoveries identifying and analyzing the approximately 25,000 genes in human DNA, the field has also given us something else: gene thieves.
Pipkin’s ruse to steal the DNA of individuals in the interest of solving a mystery is among the least troublesome forms of DNA theft. In other instances, gene robbing has sparked an international outcry.
Click here to read the rest of “Gene Swipe” from the August issue of the ABA Journal.
