The College Fix

The hearing, held by the Assembly’s Committee on Higher Education, spanned three hours and allowed experts and academics to present issues that ranged from understanding the origins of this year’s On the Same Page program, to the legal and ethical implications of the program, which allows incoming students to the College of Letters and Science to submit samples of their DNA for analysis.

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Many speakers Tuesday questioned how the campus would be able to ensure information would remain private. Because packets sent back will include both the consent form with students’ signatures and the anonymous barcodes, some pointed out that whoever opens the packets would be able to connect the students to their samples.

Others speculated that the information collected could be hacked. In 2009, the personal information of more than 160,000 people was stolen from the University Health Services’ databases.

But Schlissel and Rine assured the committee that information provided by the “innocuous” genetic variants being tested – the ability to tolerate alcohol, metabolize lactose and absorb folic acid – could not be used to identify individuals, as they are just three of some three million variants among human genomes.

“Even if the information were hacked, I am confident as a scientist that none of the data would be identifiable,” Schlissel said.

Though the campus has said the samples will be destroyed once they have been analyzed, no plans have been made for what will become of the data. Some at the meeting asserted that the data, too, should be destroyed, for fear that it could be used for other purposes. Chair of the committee Marty Block, D-San Diego, said the fact that the campus has not decided what it will do with the data is “troubling.”

Read the full story at the Daily Californian.

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