One in a Trillion : Sheriff Wants 1st DNA Lab in State

It’s called DNA fingerprinting, but it has nothing to do with fingerprints. It has to do with pointing the finger at suspects.

A test now done at five laboratories on the East Coast can determine through gene testing whether semen, hair or blood matches a suspect.

Orange County’s chief criminalist, Margaret Kuo, calls it the most important forensic discovery in recent years. And Sheriff Brad Gates wants this to be the first county in California with a DNA laboratory.

DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid, is the biochemical makeup of genes. Every person’s DNA makeup is unique.

In the past, Kuo said, semen would be tested for blood type. Typically, Kuo said, “we could say that perhaps one in five males in the world could have that blood type. But DNA testing is so specific, we can say that only one in a billion, even one in a trillion.”

County criminalists did not accept the test’s credibility on good faith. They sent their own blind-test samples to one of the East Coast labs and found the results amazingly accurate. The problem is that DNA fingerprinting, less than 2 years old, is so popular that the labs have a huge backlog of test requests from all over the nation. “It takes 3 weeks just to conduct the tests, but because of the backlog, it takes more than 3 months to get the results back,” Kuo said.

Gates’ staff is putting together a proposal, to present to the county administrator, to set up their own DNA lab. Kuo said establishing the lab would probably cost $100,000 alone. Then DNA specialists would have to be hired.

“But it’s definitely the way to go,” Kuo said. “It can not only help prove someone’s guilt, it might also prove someone’s innocence.”