[ExI] dna bank

[Darin Sunley]

Simpsons did it in 1995.

"What do you got, the whole town's DNA on file?"

"Yuh-huh. If you've ever handled a penny, the government's got your DNA.
Why do you think they keep them in circulation?"

On Sun, Oct 3, 2021 at 7:41 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

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> Polymerase Chain Reaction allows us to duplicate a strand of DNA
> arbitrarily many times, then we can chemically infer its structure.  It is
> not clear to the public that current technology does not read every base
> pair in a DNA strand, but only infers it after several generations of PCR.
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> We have long spoken of creating a human archive of DNA somehow.  Old DNA
> is of enormous value to archaeologists and anthropologists, so the rare
> case where it is preserved is a priceless jewel.
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> It occurred to me while at a fund-raiser last weekend that very few people
> carry currency anymore.  Even fundraisers use those portable credit card
> readers.  But paper currency would be an excellent DNA bank if it has been
> circulated.  We know that paper currency is made of cotton and flax, but
> that wouldn’t matter if we had the technology to find individual human skin
> cells on the currency.  We could use well-circulated paper money as a
> low-cost human DNA bank.
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> spike
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