In an announcement certain to fuel conspiracy theories and science fiction stories alike, Israeli scientists revealed that they can fabricate blood and saliva samples that don't contain DNA from the person who donated the samples, but rather hold the genetic code of an unrelated person. Theoretically, such samples could end up being used as false DNA evidence. Says lead researcher Dan Frumkin:
“You can just engineer a crime scene.... Any biology undergraduate could perform this” [The New York Times].
While it might be easier for a shadowy crime scene-fixer to plant a stray hair or cigarette butt than to cook up a misleading batch of blood or saliva, researchers say that they can imagine scenarios in which blood or saliva would be more convincing. Frumkin and his colleagues at the private company Nucleix used two different methods to create the false samples. In the first, the researchers take a tiny ...
