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The Gene Squad

Directed and Written by Jerry Thompson
Produced by Terence McKeown and Bette Thompson
Canadian Broadcasting Company, 1999
Distributed by Filmmakers Library Inc.
43 minutes

In the spring of 1977, 12-year-old Carolyn Lee disappeared on a short walk from dance class to her parents' diner in Port Alberni, British Columbia. Though her body was found the next day and a suspect identified within a few weeks, the case took 21 years to come to trial. In those two decades, no new evidence was discovered but there was new technology - DNA profile matching.

The Gene Squad traces the development of forensic DNA sampling and profiling starting with its first use in Birmingham, England in 1986. In this case, an innocent man confessed and would have been charged but for dramatic, though rather rudimentary DNA analysis and a mass screening known as "The Blooding," in which all men in the area gave blood and saliva samples. With the samples and old-fashioned police work, a serial killer was caught.

Eleven years later Royal Mounted Police detective Dan Smith read a magazine article about DNA as he sat in his dentist's waiting room. By then the Ottawa National Police Laboratory had begun DNA testing. Smith sent old vaginal swabs and soil samples from the Carolyn Lee case, along with blood from the suspect to the lab. But the crime samples had begun to decay and the analysis was inconclusive. Four years later more sophisticated profiling and electron microscope scanning produced a match. But would DNA evidence be admitted in a trial? Had the suspect been fully aware of what was at risk when he gave a blood sample? Was the "blooding" voluntary and informed? Detectives waited. In 1990 Canadian Parliament passed a law allowing police to serve warrants for DNA samples. Again they tested the subject, this time with legal backing, and this time went to trial. Carolyn Lee's murderer, who thought he would never be charged with the crime, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. It took 21 years, but, as one detective noted "the new science did it all."

"The new science" also solved the rape of Debbie Smith in 1989 in Virginia, a case in which there was DNA evidence but no suspect. Four months after the crime, Virginia put its statewide DNA database online, the first in the country. The law requiring all convicted rapists and violent offenders to give blood and saliva samples for analysis and entry into the database was immediately controversial. A class action suit on behalf of prisoners contended that the database presumed that a convict would be guilty of some unknown crime sometime in the future. The court dismissed the case and the Smith rape was solved with a cold match - simply the result of telling the computer to look for the same DNA numbers entered in the course of other crimes, finding a match, and getting a name from the FBI computer which links databases in all 50 states.

But the class lawsuit did touch on an important point, one which Canadian Privacy Commissioner Bruce Phillips feels is the core of ethical, legal, medical and employment issues, among others. The question is one of privacy. This powerful tool, which can indicate psychological, physical, medical and behavioral characteristics , must be very carefully handled in terms of how it's used, who has access to it, and how much control citizens have over the use of their own DNA. Should DNA samples be destroyed as soon as they are entered into a database to thwart any temptation to use the sample for other purposes? As Phillips says "…it will all have value to somebody, somewhere." What is more important - solving crimes or insuring privacy?

Despite the vast amount of money required to test hundreds of thousands of existing, unentered DNA samples, the value of forensic DNA sampling as a crime-fighting tool has just begun. DNA data banks are becoming common around the world. A new generation of analysis will allow DNA identification with absolute certainty, not mathematical estimates of how close the match may be. Hand-held DNA analysis kits will be available to police at the scene of a crime, allowing for instant identification of suspects. And the issue of who controls DNA and what is done with it will continue to grow as well.