Most People of European Ancestry Can Be Identified From a Relative’s DNA
Even people who have never taken a genetic test can be tracked down like the Golden State Killer suspect.
In April, the world learned that police had tracked down the alleged Golden State Killer by using a genealogy site to match DNA from crime scenes to that of his distant relatives. The next arrest that resulted from the same technique—for a double murder in Washington State—came less than a month later. And then another and another and another.
As the wave of reports went on, Yaniv Erlich, a computational biologist, was working to understand the reach of such police searches. Were they lucky breaks? Or could nearly every American be found through a third cousin’s DNA? With every identification that made the news, Erlich had to update the paper he found through genetic genealogy is —the latest .
