I had the sudden thought – what if, everytime police agencies collect and process DNA samples of suspects, crimals, personnel getting background checks, or whatever, they check these results against lists of people who are looking for matches for such things as bone marrow or kidneys. And if there is a positive match, they provide enough information to the tested person so they could step up and make a donation if they choose.
If we could leave the political likelihood of this aside for the moment, I have no idea if this is technically feasible. I imagine government agencies test for a couple of main reasons: either to test one or more suspects aginst a piece of unidentified DNA evidence collected at a crime scene, or the opposite, to run a sample from a crime scene, or a job applicant, against a database of criminal ID DNA samples.
So, would information from such an ID test yield enough information to make such comparisons to the transplant lists? How far apart are these tests?
Is there even a single test that can be used to check against multiple lists, totally aside from any police issues?
Here’s another wrinkle. You share DNA with your brother or sister. If they get arrested and DNA is taken , they get you for free without your knowledge. There are enough matches that they would be able to know the relationship.
We want only **highly motivated ** people to be on the National Marrow Donor Program Registry.
After all, if a volunteer on the Registry does match a searching patient, then we will be asking that volunteer to undergo a risky procedure, with long, long needles that go deep into the butt, all the way through to the pelvic bones.
We don’t want people to sign up just because they were arrested and they think that by “volunteering” for the Registry the cops and the DA might go easy on them. I put “volunteering” in quotes because there would be direct or indirect pressure in such a situation. Always.
That’s just the first thing that popped into my head, but there are a host of other ethical reasons why this would be a bad idea.
P.S. **gonzomax ** must have flunked out of Genetics 101.
My idea is not to involuntarily put someone on a list. It is simply to inform them that they match someone who needs a donor, and let them decide whether to follow up.
However, this goes beyond the scope of my OP, which is an attempt to discover whether this is technically rather than politically feasible.
IOW, will the type of tests typically performed by law inforcement even be used to do such a comparison? If not, could another test be performed which would fulfill both needs?
Is it legal to ask for money in return for transplants?
I can see a shady person being told they could donate a liver to a dying child and instant dollar signs light up. In fact, I can see desperate people waiting on a transplant demanding that the doctor tell them who the match was so they could pay them ungodly amounts of cash.
In answer to your first question: No. The tests that are done to determine a transplant match focus on a small portion of human chromosome 6 called the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC). Without getting too much into the technical details, *histocompatibility * means how well two immune systems match, which is what you’re trying to do when you put a healthy immune system (derived from the donated marrow cells) into a patient with diseased marrow. Leukemia, for example, while it is a malignant disease of the blood (too many white blood cells), is caused by defective marrow, where all blood cells originate.
The DNA tests done to determine transplant compatibility focus on categorizing the small proteins on the surface of your body’s cells called antigens. These antigens are what your immune system uses to determine whether something in your body belongs to it or is foreign. So, to reiterate, the DNA tests done by the forensic folks are quite different. They use the same technique, but they look at different chromosomes.
In answer to your second question: Yes, another test can be performed, namely one that looks at the MHC on human chromosome 6 as described above. But who’s going to step forward and pay for this? I doubt that many police departments have an extra $50-$100 to spend on each suspect that they bring in.