Blackburn’s town centre pubs could be given a boost as one of a number of chosen places to receive a licence to collect DNA.
This followed success of the town’s Covid 19 vaccination programme, which was put down to Blackburn’s above average footfall in its town centre. Now it is hoped to capitalise on this success by taking things a step further and collecting DNA for scientific study.
Blackburn people are no strangers to giving their data for analysis. Rovers fans, along with home supporters, gave voluntary saliva swab samples some years ago when they were playing a match down at Chelsea. Sample results indicated Chelsea fans were mainly descended from Normans while most Rovers fans who participated were descended from Vikings.
There was also the infamous June Anne Devaney murder case in Queens Park Hospital grounds, where the perpetrator was caught by mass fingerprinting many of Blackburn’s adult male population. It was the first time this kind of exercise had been used to solve a murder in Great Britain.
Certain pubs in Blackburn town centre will roll out state of the art smart glass washers. These have a dual action process of first collecting DNA from recently used glasses, then washing them in the usual way. By the time these glass washer’s contents become clean and sparkling, their accumulated DNA fingerprints will have been biometrically recorded and sent off to their online databank through cyberspace for processing.
There have been questions raised about this form of personal information collection and its legal implications. But it seems to have been going on for years. We all leave traces of DNA wherever we go and this is known as ‘Shed’ DNA. It doesn’t come from a shed but is one of the most used terms for abandoned DNA. Police and forensic teams collect it at crime scenes and elsewhere from discarded cigarette buts, plastic cups, cans, chocolate and sweet wrappers, the list goes on.
Therefore, it stands to reason when you go in a pub for a pint, you do so voluntarily. You are then served a drink in a polygenic pint glass belonging to the hostelry you are in. When you sup up, you discard your glass for collection and washing and you can’t help but leave your DNA all over the place. This same rule can apply to near enough everywhere you go, including where you live.
There is expected to be an enormous demand for this kind of data. Not only will law enforcement authorities be interested, but so will medical, insurance, dating and family ancestry organisations. Mining this kind of data from public houses could be seen as appropriate due to quite a lot of the latter often being an end product of what is sold in a pub. So it seems quite fitting for this information to be gleaned from one of its primary sources.
