The most useful genome for committing a crime
What is the optimal qualification to get out of a tight spot after you have committed a crime? Coolness? Unscrupulousness? Brutality? Exceptional intelligence? Or stupid constables (LOL)?
The unexpected answer is that the optimal qualification for a thug to get away without punishment is to have the adequate, well, genome. No, dude, I am not speaking of a cryptic “crime gene” or something like that.
You need a… well, it’s a really bizarre story.
Did you notice the jewellery robbery in Berlin in January? It was a spectacular coup, just as in the 1964 heist film Topkapi – three people had abseiled through a skylight into the German shopping mall KaDeWe with a rope-ladder and had stolen jewels amounting to €5 million (the masked men were filmed by a security camera). Two of the Berlin bandits were caught by the police soon after the theft while the third one still is on the run.
There is a startling detail around this robbery: while forensic scientists have found (and successfully analysed) the burglars’ DNA, they cannot use this DNA as evidence anyway.
Yes, you can believe me! It’s impossible to convict the two burglars that are arrested on remand by genetic fingerprinting (at least for the German justice). Why?
Quite simply, the suspects are monozygotic twins. They have identical DNA, so it is not possible to distinguish one from another (at least for the German authorities who are only allowed to analyse eight VNTR loci in criminal cases).
Before the court “twin A” would lay the blame on “twin B” and “twin B” would lay the blame on “twin A”. Hence the judge would be unable to convict any of them.
Are the German police a dead duck in this special case? It seems so.
However, if the police were allowed to check and compare the twins’ V(D)J regions (in B cells), the situation would change dramatically. These V(D)J regions contain genes that play important roles in the immune system. They are different, even in monozygotic twins.
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but why would you expect B cells to be found on the crime scene - unless one of the twins was bleeding?