Genetic Technology Development and International Security Efforts

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Genomics has become increasingly important for law and policing, as evidenced by the proliferation of national criminal DNA databases throughout the world. New national criminal DNA databases, once limited to high-income countries, are becoming widespread in middle-income countries and they are also beginning to be established in low-income countries. But DNA databases require infrastructural resources and expertise to implement and maintain. How are places that are marked by capacity challenges and conditions of scarcity establishing and running DNA databases under these conditions, and how might their strategies inform the global future of this phenomenon? How does DNA become transformed into something that is reliable and useful in national legal contexts and in international security efforts, and what are the consequences for how science and citizenship are lived and experienced? This research project will address these questions by investigating the intersection between genomics and law, related infrastructural investments, and the networks of people who must work together to transform genetic data into legally legible evidence.Dr. Noah Tamarkin of the Ohio State University, explores how the use of genetic technologies in criminal law might change experiences and forms of citizenship as well as social and cultural understandings of science and what constitutes reliable evidence. The research will investigate global criminal forensic genetics as an emerging citizenship formation with interconnected local, national, and transnational influences and implications. The research will take place in South Africa, a middle-income country that has just begun to implement a new law that creates an expansive national criminal DNA database for which the national police force will have primary responsibility. The project will use ethnographic methodologies to consider how a cross-section of people from diverse social and political backgrounds who have different forms of expertise and different ideas about the meaning of science and justice are brought together through their roles in enacting South Africa's investment in forensic genetics. The project will include police, forensic laboratories, courtrooms, and NGOs and private companies that contribute to forensic genetics training and advocacy. South Africa is an ideal case study because their national investment in genomics for law enforcement is new and actively taking place throughout the research period. South Africa's current investments raise important questions about the global scope and scale, and the local specificity and variation, of intersections between genomics and law. This research therefore offers an actively emerging view into how DNA comes to matter in new ways as it moves out of research laboratories and into a broader public sphere.