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SexprintingUsing Electrical Gene Resonance to Track Sexual ActivityTechnical advances make tracking sexual activity easier than taking fingerprints. Your sexual history is magnetically resonating in the bodies of people you have slept with. Sex sleuths like Dr. Piotr Szak of Investigation Laboratories, Inc. may be able to discover secrets you forgot you were even hiding. |
He said, she said; and some times nobody's talking. Uncovering the truth about illicit sexual encounters has been the top story of the Clinton impeachment scandal, but it also is a quieter daily struggle in divorce courts, rape trials and ordinary relationships all over the world.
Photographic evidence is rare, and DNA testing requires either an immediate sperm sample to be collected from a potentially hostile witness or the rare pregnancy. The holy grail of sexual investigation would be a failsafe method of determining who had sex with whom and when. But how likely is that, really?
Enter Dr. Piotr Szak of Investigation Laboratories, Inc in Lafayette, North Carolina. "You could save so many people so much trouble if you didn't have to guess who'd been playing games with who," he says. "And you'd stop a lot of divorces before they even became marriages. The trouble is, people act like nobody's ever going to know, and most of the time they're right."
If Dr. Szak is right, that's all about to change. But if his experience is any guide, the change may be more stormy than anyone bargains for.
When scientists at the University of Basel in Switzerland announced in March that segments of DNA conduct electricity, most people greeted the news with a shrug, but for Dr. Szak this discovery was the launch of a brainstorm.
The researchers discovered that DNA works as a miniature semiconductor, allowing electrons to move along its double-helix more efficiently than in insulators, but less efficiently than in metal conductors like gold or copper.
Szak discovered that by exposing a specimen of DNA to an alternating magnetic field, he could cause the DNA to conduct electricity and to respond by emitting magnetic fields with spectra specific to their lengths and structures.
A human specimen will show several distinct spectral lines of magnetic resonance corresponding to each of the chromosomes in a human cell (the minor genetic differences between individuals do not effect the conductivity or size of the DNA to any detectable degree).
When Szak was fine-tuning his machine on spare blood and tissue samples from his lab, he discovered rogue spectral lines that did not correspond with human chromosomes. Upon investigation, he found that these lines corresponded to DNA from other organisms that had infected the samples.
Other investigators had stumbled upon this same phenomenon and are considering the technique as a quick method of screening for chromosomal abnormalities or the presence of pathogens in the human body. Szak went one step further.
"Our bodies have a whole zoo of critters inside," Szak says. "Most of them we never notice because they don't bother us. A lot of them we get from our parents, and a lot of them we just pick up from our environment, but some of them are sexually transmitted."
In fact, Szak says, the vast majority of sexually transmitted diseases are asymptomatic, and the ones most of us hear about - AIDS, Herpes, etc. - are just the dangerous tip of a mostly benign iceberg.
It is Szak's idea to use these benign organisms as markers. "This promises to take the guesswork and moralism out of the picture and make this a process of scientific detective work."
Let's say we have a case where a girl has remembered during therapy that she was raped by her sunday school teacher. He says he never touched her.
Because many "recovered" memories of this sort turn out to be tricks of the mind, some doubt is in order, but on the other hand, it's also troublingly common for men in authority positions to sexually abuse children and get away with it.
And typicaly, this is where the legal process gets mired in an unsatisfying stalemate in which everybody has their reputations damaged, and nobody feels that justice has been done.
Not any more.
With Szak's method, justice is a simple two part process. First, analyze tissue or lymph samples from both parties to see if there are any matching sexually-transmitted chromosomes. If not, either no rape took place, or no organisms were transferred during the rape.
If a match is found, a more thorough sequencing is done of the genes of the shared organism. If they are of the same strain, its likely that they jumped from one body to the other during sexual contact - sexual contact that would be hard to reconcile with the defendant's "I never touched her" story.
By finding how different the two strains of the organism have become through random mutation, and using the average mutation rate of the organism as a sort of "genetic clock," it's even possible to estimate how long ago the infection took place.
Already this new tracking method has broken up one marriage.
The benign sexually transmitted disease mollusca credulis is used in Szak's laboratory to test the new technique. Once a rare 'hitchhiker' organism, it now infects over 90% of sexually active adults. Because it is not passed from mother to child, because it is so common, because its average mutation rate is precisely known, and because its complete gene sequence was recently mapped by Brigham Young University researchers, it is ideal for Szak's experiments.
Using tissue samples from colleagues and lab workers, Szak created a chart that mapped everyone in the sample back to a single unknown carrier who was infected with mollusca at some time between 1905 and 1915. He published the results and made what in retrospect he agrees was an "ethical slip" of both publishing his coded data on the internet and giving the individual subjects access to the code number that represented their own sample.
"Before long, we had an informal investigative committee that was half Independent Counsel and half Spanish Inquisition," Szak says. Some of the numbers just didn't add up... unless you eliminated the assumption that the individuals involved had been faithful to their spouses and lovers.
One of his colleagues lost her husband, and Szak narrowly avoided losing his job.
Alan Roeman of the Coalition for Human Science says that episodes like this highlight the careless approach to the ethical issues involved in the laboratory analysis of people's sex lives. "It should be obvious that a technology like this is going to have awful repercussions. Imagine for a moment that you can never have sex again without someone, anyone, perhaps someday far in the future, digging it up and using it against you."
"There's no locked door secure enough to hide behind. Are we sure this is a good thing?"
- Jack L. Eule