Parabon Nanolabs/Snapshot Accused of Racism

[Kyniska]

I agree with you and Dr. Rutherford. I'm a bioinformatician in a clinical genome sequencing lab. You can rule *out* various discrete phenotypes with DNA haplotyping (like red hair is mostly understood to be controlled by one gene, so the absence of that variant in your sequencing reads is going to tell you the DNA source did not have red hair with high certainty...but since red hair is recessive the mere presence of that allele, especially if there are other variants of that allele present will NOT give you as high a certainty that the DNA source does have red hair) but putting them together in an entire face and implying the overall appearance is "backed by DNA" is utter bunkum and totally irresponsible. They're just putting the features a haplotype caller shows as "more likely" on generic faces and tweaking each one a bit to give them more credibility.

Edit to add this quote from the Nature article, emphasis mine:

Armentrout says that Parabon doesn’t need to know how each gene contributes to appearance in order to create the image of a face; he says the associations between SNPs and faces in the company’s database is good enough for its mathematical models, and that police-department satisfaction is all the proof he needs. Just because the firm doesn’t publish doesn’t mean its method is flawed, Armentrout says. “We’re not in business to write papers,” he says. “The results speak for themselves.” But Shriver says that making an arrest doesn’t mean that Snapshot works as Parabon claims. Nor do the police have a rigorous way to show that the Snapshot profile matches their suspect, he says.

Also, if you go to Parabon's page, note how well their algorithm "predicts" whether a Black person will have straightened or natural hair, or whether they'll have a protective hairstyle in their booking photo...

 

[MajorHoople]

Does the same accusation apply for Caucasian men whose profiles they developed based on the perp's genetic phenotype have also been discriminated against? If you can't make accurate predictions of facial profiles or pigmentation from DNA, has Parabon also been wrong about the physical characteristics they developed for Caucasian DNA?

I have to admit, some of the profiles they've done for Caucasian persons have a sort of generic look to them, but others seem fairly accurate.

Here's a paper published in 2019 about guidelines to follow when using DNA phenotyping.
Studies have shown the three parts of DNA phenotyping do have some positive predictive value, but must be used carefully.

The Use of Forensic DNA Phenotyping in Predicting Appearance and Biogeographic Ancestry - PMC

Persons whose identifying DNA profile (STR profile) is not yet known to the ingvestigating authorities cannot be identified by standard forensic DNA analysis (STR profiling) as it is now practiced. In view of the current public debate, particularly ...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

I guess that's where the Edmonton Police made their mistake. If they had released their DNA phenotyping snapshot for a caucasian suspect there would be no protest or outrage. MOO