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Scientists are greeting with surprise and dismay a project to use DNA and isotope analysis of tissue from asylum seekers to evaluate their nationality and help decide who can enter the United Kingdom. “Horrifying,” “naïve,” and “flawed” are among the adjectives geneticists and isotope specialists have used to describe the “Human Provenance pilot project,” launched quietly in mid-September by the U.K. Border Agency. Their consensus: The project is not scientifically valid—or even sensible.
“My first reaction is this is wildly premature, even ignoring the moral and ethical aspects,” says Alec Jeffreys of the University of Leicester, who pioneered human DNA fingerprinting.
U.K. immigration policies have been under scrutiny recently as the number of people claiming asylum has soared and as French police in Calais last week cleared a camp of migrants hoping to make it across the English Channel. The existence of a DNA-based program to identify nationality was recently revealed by the Daily Mail and The Observer, sparking protests from refugee advocates.
The Border Agency’s DNA-testing plans would use mouth swabs for mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome testing, as well as analyses of subtle genetic variations called single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). One goal of the project is to determine whether asylum-seekers claiming to be from Somalia and fleeing persecution are actually from another African country such as Kenya. If successful, the Border Agency suggests its pilot project could be extended to confirming other nationalities. Yet scientists say the Border Agency’s goals confuse ancestry or ethnicity with nationality. David Balding, a population geneticist at Imperial College London, notes that “genes don’t respect national borders, as many legitimate citizens are migrants or direct descendants of migrants, and many national borders split ethnic groups.”
Another geneticist says the Forensic Science Service, a former government agency that has been privatized, requested his opinion earlier this year on how to develop a genetic assay to distinguish among East African populations. “I thought it was for forensic purposes, not border control,” says Christopher Phillips of the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, who with colleagues recently used a DNA sample to correctly infer the ancestry of a suspect in the 2004 train bombings in Madrid. After expressing skepticism about the goal,Phillips suggested some research the FSS could conduct but says he heard no more from them.
Mark Thomas, a geneticist of University College London who considers the Human Provenance program “horrifying,” contends that even determining a person’s ancestryas distinct from nationalityis more problematic than many believe. “mtDNA will never have the resolution to specify a country of origin. Many DNA ancestry testing companies have sprung up over the last 10 years, often based on mtDNA, but what they are selling is little better than genetic astrology,” he says. “Dense genomic SNP data does have some resolution … but not at a very local scale, and with considerable errors.”
Details of the plan to use isotope analyses in addition to DNA analyses have intensified skepticism. The plan is to look for ratios of certain isotopes in tissue that could be matched to ratios in the environment where a person was born or grew up. But isotope specialists point to a seemingly obvious flaw: There’s no scientifically accepted evidence that isotope signatures at birth or during childhood are still present in adult samples of constantly growing tissues such as hair and nails. At best, researchers say, those tissues reflect the past year or so of a person’s life. “It worries me as a scientist that actual peoples’ lives are being influenced based on these methods,” says Jane Evans, head of Science-based Archaeology at the National Environment Research Council Isotope Geosciences Laboratory in Nottingham.
Although the agency hasn’t detailed the isotopes it is examining, the use of hair and nail samples suggest the tests will look at “lighter” element isotopes, such as those of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen, all of which are incorporated into the keratin and other proteins as those tissues grow. Isotopes of strontium and other “heavier” elements incorporate into bones and teeth throughout life and some evidence suggests that strontium measurements can match people to geographic locales in which they were born, or at least grew up. In contrast, the lighter isotopes in tissues such as hair and nails being collected by the Border Agency are typically used to reveal recent diets and climatic conditions, not ethnicity. “I don’t think I could tell the difference between a Kenyan and a Somalian,” says Tamsin O'Connell of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, an archaeologist who specializes in studying light isotopes from soft tissues.
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