Swiss forensic geneticists analyzed DNA recovered from postage stamps dating back to World War I and solved a century-old paternity puzzle.
: it’s costly, it involves tampering with or destroying potentially sentimental family heirlooms, and there is little guarantee that it will be successful. For example, when relying on DNA extracted from saliva, you’re taking a gamble that the sender was the one who licked the envelope flap or the stamp, which is not always the case—an old practice was to wet stamps on common pads at post offices.
As genetic genealogy is increasingly being used to unravel family mysteries, it also opens up a big can of worms. For one: Don’t the dead deserve some privacy? The deceased, due to their complicated circumstances, can never give consent to the testing.
Copeland realized that, through the popularization of these cheap spit kits, the world is in the midst of a big social experiment, with potentially devastating repercussions. “The people who discover their own genetic origins aren't what they thought are often traumatized by it,” she says. “It's incredibly painful, it's dislocating, and basically their personal narratives are completely disrupted.
of two of the king’s living relatives, and discovered that the blood indeed belonged to Albert I, contradicting the more sinister rumors surrounding his death. Larmuseau’s investigation stopped there. But if he had chosen to dig deeper, he could have, in theory, revealed information about the king’s genetics that might compromise the privacy of the current Belgian royal family.
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