DNA Databases and Medicine
Many countries collect newborn blood samples to screen for diseases mainly with a genetic basis. Mainly these are destroyed soon after testing. In some countries the dried blood (and the DNA) is retained for later tesing.
In Denmark the Danish Newborn Screening Biobank at Statens Serum Institut keeps a blood sample from people born after 1981. The purpose is to test for Phenylketonuria and other diseases. But it is also used for DNA tests to identify deceased and suspected criminals. Parents can request that the blood sample of their newborn is destroyed after the result of test is known.
Read more about this topic: National DNA Database
Famous quotes containing the words dna and/or medicine:
“Here [in London, history] ... seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over the centuries to the dictates of some now all-but-unreadable DNA of commerce and empire.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)
“Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. It is impossible to find a hygienest who does not debase his theory of the healthful with a theory of the virtuous.... The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)