Worromot writes "A group of geneticists published a method to delimit if a given individual's DNA is present in a mixture (e.g., in a pool of blood on a carpet). An individual's DNA can comprise less than 1% of the mixture. (The article is in open access on PLoS anesthetic website.) While this is a thinkable boon for forensics, there are more tout de suite worries about the privacy of the competitors of the dissection studies that had been under way for many years. As Science brochure writes, 'The finding that a type of genetic data that is widely shared and often posted online can be traced back to individuals has prompted the U.S. subject Institutes of Health and the Wellcome Trust to strip some genetic data from their publicly approachable Web sites and NIH to prescribe that other institutions do the same.' The gravest worry was that an single who had someone's genetic code could determine, based on the pooled data, whether the person participated in a disease study and whether they were in the disease group, or thereby glean private health information. NIH plans to ask institutions that have posted pooled data on their own Web sites to take these down, too."

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