The Business of DNA Forensics An
interview with
Paul Billings
Paul Billings, MD, PhD, is Vice Chair of the Board of Directors of the Council for Responsible Genetics and Chief Medical Officer of Life Technologies, Corp. This interview represents his own views rather than those of Life Technologies. GW: Is the business of DNA forensics a recent addition at Life Technologies? PB: No, we’ve been involved in this space for some time. GW: Is it a field that’s growing recently? PB: We don’t stay in business lines that don’t grow! That wouldn’t be doing our job for our shareholders. DNA forensics has grown well over the last ten years or so. We think it will grow as the technologies become better and better. As they get more specific, and also better in terms of lower cost—and potentially faster—there will be more use for them. GW: Who might those future customers be? Are we talking about small crime labs? PB: I don’t think so. One of the issues to date has been that the efficiencies of the current system where it is deployed aren’t optimal, so you have catch-up work in those areas. Then you have new populations, whether they be countries coming online or different subgroups within the countries coming online, where there would be greater need. As an example, there are large population centers in the world where this technology hasn’t really been applied or used as a forensic tool. They Volume 24 Number 6
have crimes where people are wrongly accused and need to be exonerated, and they have crimes where this material may help to find the real criminal. So what I’m really saying is that the technology is very accurate, very quick, and not very costly, and it allows some of the developing markets to take advantage of it as well. GW: Can you give a quick idea of what technologies exactly we’re talking about—what are the products themselves? PB: We make the components of DNA forensic tests. We provide the amplification and analytic tools, whether they be genotyping for the variable CODIS regions or direct sequencing of that material—which doesn’t go on very much, but as sequencing becomes less expensive it may go on more. We provide all the instruments and reagents to allow laboratories to do that. GW: Is there any consulting that goes along with this work? PB: We would be asked to consult with a lab in a country, where a contract to provide forensic identification exists. It could be the government lab—the model for delivering this stuff varies from country to country. Some are governmental labs, some are contract labs. We would consult with the lab directors to make sure they are doing the absolute top-quality work. Our interest is that whatever forensic DNA analysis is going on, that it be absolutely the best quality, so that the number of scientific or laboratory errors is reduced to an absolute minimum.
GW: As Life Technologies is moving into a new country—maybe it’s France, maybe it’s somewhere like India or South Africa—beyond just the technical aspects, how is the company involved in sowing the seeds for … PB: We’re not. The company stands for ethical and appropriate use of DNA technologies. As an example, at the last meeting of all our employees—we have about 10,000 employees—the featured guest was a guy who had been exonerated by the Innocence Project, and they had used our technology. He basically went up there and said, “I owe you my life.” He was talking both about the lawyers at the Innocence Project and also about the fact that the technology existed and was done properly so that a sample that had existed for—I don’t know how long, but he had been on death row for 18 years—that sample could be extracted and analyzed using our methods to exonerate him. We stand for the ethical and appropriate use of high quality identification technology to assist the judicial process. The decision about whether that evidence is appropriate for a country’s judicial process is not our business. All they can know is that if they decide to apply it, we’re going GeneWatch 19