Firm Seeks to Win Over Police to DNA-Based Strategy

Zach Gaskin might be called a connoisseur of genotypes.

At airports or company meetings, he studies faces, eyes, complexions. And sometimes, he just can’t resist.

“You look like an interesting mix,” he’ll say to strangers. “Can we test your DNA?”

Those who are not too taken aback may become new entries in a growing catalog of DNA types being collected by Gaskin’s employer. The enterprise, Gaskin acknowledged, is sometimes perceived as a potentially offensive application of genetic science to crime-fighting. But he contends it should be viewed as just the contrary: a counterweight to unfounded notions of racial differences.

Gaskin, technical director for a Sarasota, Fla., company called DNAPrint genomics Inc., was one of a handful of vendors hawking wares at a recent California Homicide Investigators Assn. conference held by the Los Angeles Police Department in Universal City, and the only private contractor to be deemed worthy of a lengthy presentation before the whole conference, which drew about 650 detectives from around the state.

It wasn’t the company’s first foray into L.A., however. Gaskin said he had been seeking the LAPD’s business for some time -- so far drawing interest, but no commitments.

In the year DNAPrint has been providing forensic services to police nationwide, it has aided in about 25 investigations, he said -- only two of which have resulted in arrests. In one high-profile case, that of a Louisiana serial killer, a task force that included Baton Rouge police used DNAPrint to conclude that their suspect was probably not a white man, but a black man.

LAPD Det. Dennis Kilcoyne, one of the conference organizers, said he had sought out DNAPrint simply because he was intrigued by potential future uses of new DNA technology.

“They say this technology is developing so fast that, just around the corner, we will have a speck of something from a crime scene, and DNA will tell us hair and eye color,” he said. “The stuff they are talking about is very ‘Star Wars.’ ... We can’t comprehend what’s down the road.”

Some experts, however, doubt DNA tests’ ability to predict racial identity, because people of all colors tend to have mixed ancestry. “I would be surprised” if the test were very accurate, said Wayne Grody, director of the DNA Diagnostic Laboratory at UCLA.

Scientists have found a few examples of particular genetic mutations passed through generations in populations with little history of mixing outside their group, he said, but such findings could more accurately be said to mark “accidents of history” than to describe what many people think of as race.

Race, agreed Jeanette Papp, a UCLA professor of human genetics, “is a social construct, not a biological reality.”

There are more differences “between baboons in adjacent valleys in Africa than people from Sweden and Africa,” she said.

The little information such tests could yield, she added, might not be worth “a big price in bad PR.” And some LAPD detectives said DNAPrint’s findings seemed too vague and general to be of much help.

But 77th Street Division Det. Daniel Myers was interested: “In cases where we have DNA but don’t know a suspect, it might be nice to have a profile,” he said.

A publicly traded start-up that has never posted a profit, DNAPrint is now sending its representatives west in the hope of picking up more contracts from California law enforcement agencies, Gaskin said.

DNAPrint’s investigative branch, called DNAWitness, claims to be able to help investigators narrow searches for suspects, or for unidentified victims, by comparing information from their DNA with data from sample groups tested around the world. The company breaks down information from individuals’ DNA into percentages matching that of sample groups of sub-Saharan Africans, Native Americans, East Asians and Indo-Europeans.

Most people’s DNA is a mix of two or more groupings. But proportions vary, and it is the variation DNAPrint uses to predict ethnic identification. Gaskin acknowledged that the comparisons are based on smaller sample groups than the company would like, but he argued that its growing database would improve the service with time.

A blind test of the technology on homicide detectives at the conference last week produced mostly accurate findings, though some were quite broad -- South Asian, Native American or Caucasian, for example, was one finding. The test is better at eliminating possibilities than pinpointing race, Gaskin said.

But what the test most vividly demonstrated was the variety of ancestry that hides behind loose generalities of race. A quarter of the DNA of a detective who identified herself as African American tested as European. A seventh of that of a detective who identified himself as white tested as African.

That’s typical, Gaskin said. People who look white commonly have nonwhite DNA. In the company’s tests, African ancestry has been especially likely to show up in people of Scandinavian heritage, for example. And Asian ancestry is especially common in those of German and East European heritage, he said.

African Americans usually prove to have significant shares of DNA that match European or Native American samples, and Latinos, he said, are an exceptionally unpredictable mix.

In general, Gaskin avoids using the definitive language that commonly characterizes race in everyday speech. He does not talk of people’s race, but rather, their mix. He does not refer to people’s “being” black or white, but rather, as having genetic profiles consistent with those of surveyed individuals who identify themselves as one or the other.

What race you call yourself, Gaskin said, may be predicted to some degree by your ancestry. And this, in turn, may yield clues as to where you might live, your background, your culture -- all variables that might somehow be relevant to solving a crime.

But police officials said they would require an independent evaluation of the company’s claims before considering the service.

“We are always interested in new technologies,” said Steve Johnson, administrator of the LAPD’s Scientific Investigation Division. “But obviously, a lot more work needs to be done before using taxpayers’ funds to fund that kind of work.”