2023-05-16 15:26:17
In environmental samples, human DNA sections are often found that can still be read and assigned to individual people, write researchers from the USA, Ireland and Spain in “Nature Ecology & Evolution”. Human DNA has been identified in water samples taken both near and far from populated areas, human footprints on beaches, and air samples from occupied and unoccupied rooms. The samples of this “environmental DNA” (eDNA) are analyzed in order to investigate, for example, wildlife populations, the occurrence of invasive species or conditions of former ecosystems, and the occurrence of pathogens.
Some samples were of sufficient quality to enable conclusions to be drawn about the origin or risk of diseases. This “human genetic by-catch” harbors ethical challenges: the unintentional sequencing of human DNA can hardly be avoided. A comment published to accompany the study states that regulation of modern genomic methods should be considered.
Weigh up the risks before you start your studies
However, it is not easy to identify individual people from the DNA in the samples: this requires databases with gene sequences that can be used for comparison. But maybe these will be easily available in the future. It is important to protect individuals as well as entire groups such as minorities from the misuse of genetic information, says the political scientist Barbara Prainsack from the University of Vienna, who was not involved in the study of New Technologies, an advisory body to the President of the EU Commission.
“However, the goal cannot be to classify all environmental research in which it is conceivable that human DNA is also analyzed as research on humans,” says Prainsack. Therefore, it should not be subjected to the same strict research-ethical guidelines. If the analysis of human DNA is not the research goal, but is nevertheless very likely, systematic consideration should be given to how negative effects can be avoided before the start of the study.
In general, this technical innovation shows the need to rethink certain traditional ideas: “For example, research on humans and research on other species can always be clearly separated from one another – this is often no longer the case,” says Prainsack. The idea that human data is only subject to special protection if it is personal data in the legal sense is no longer up to date.
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