A DOCUMENT shredder is a good investment for anyone worried about identity theft. Why make it easy for someone to grab your credit card and bank account numbers from discarded statements?
The information contained in the DNA that we all leave lying around on items such as coffee cups and discarded tissues is just as sensitive, but there is no equivalent of a document shredder for genetic detritus. This is what makes the relative ease with which we hijacked commercial services to obtain genome scans from a reporter’s “abandoned” DNA so disturbing (see “How my genome was hacked”).
What…
