'Racial' DNA profiling likened to Nazi thinking
- Claim that DNA security profiling 'inaccurate' and perhaps 'dangerous'
- Oxford Professor Brian Sykes says there cannot be a 'pure' race
- Channel 4 show tests Baroness Thatcher's daughter to find mixed ancestry
Key quote ""From the kind of research that I and others are involved in - we are looking at these direct lines of descent - you can tell there's no such thing as racial or ethnic purity in genetic terms" -
Professor Bryan Sykes
Story in full ONE of Britain's leading geneticists has attacked the use of DNA to carry out "racial profiling", comparing it with the warped thinking that saw the Nazis send people to the gas chamber.
Bryan Sykes, a professor of human genetics at Oxford University, insisted that the analysis, which is offered by private firms, was based on an "inaccurate way of thinking about genetics".
He warned that racial prejudice and the idea of racial superiority were still "a dangerous human pre-occupation" that might be fuelled by racial profiling. A Channel 4 programme, provocatively entitled 100 per cent English, will tonight detail one such test that was carried out on Carol Thatcher, the daughter of former prime minister, Baroness Thatcher.
The test results claim to show that Ms Thatcher's and, by implication her mother's, ancestry was 76 per cent north European and 24 per cent Middle Eastern.
Prof Sykes, who lives on Skye when not in Oxford, told The Scotsman: "From the kind of research that I and others are involved in - we are looking at these direct lines of descent - you can tell there's no such thing as racial or ethnic purity in genetic terms."
source:
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1676082006
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