The new and another facial technology making advances with the uses of genomes. A biologist and boss of Human Longevity, CRAIG VENTER, a San Diego-based company that is working on building the world’s largest genomic database. During the late 1990s, CRAIG VENTER declared that public funded project for sequencing the human genome was moving about the wrong way and so, he has developed a cheaper and quicker method of his own. The latest disarrangements of feathers came from work that helps in predicting what the person would actually look like when discovered from their genetic data.
The human longevity has so far assembled 45,000 genomes and these are from patients who are under clinical trials, and the data is obtained from the patient’s associated physical attributes. Machine learning tools are used by the company for the data analysis and later make predictions of on how genetic sequences tie knots with physical features. These efforts have so far improved to a point where the company is able generating photo-like pictures on them without even having a look at them.
It was mentioned in a paper recently, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Venter and his colleagues were found describing the process, which they call a “phenotype-based genomic identification”. The troop took an ethnically huge group of 1,061 people of varied ages and tried sequencing their genomes. They also moved on with taking some high resolution and three-dimensional images of people’s faces and tried measuring their eye color, weight, and height. All this information was collected and used as a “training set” for developing an algorithm that would be capable of working out of what the humans would look like in the physical foundation of their genes.
When this algorithm was applied to unknown genomes, the team was totally able to generate the images that could be capable of matching up with the real photographs for the minimum of eight out of the ten people. However, this fell to a very less five out of ten as soon as the test was restricted to those of a single race that was helpful in narrowing facial differences. Past a year ago, while using the same algorithm the company was able of producing the same algorithm that the company produced a prediction of what your correspondent actually looked like at the age of 21 with the usage of genomes. The outcomes can later be compared with a photograph of her at that particular age. In fact, the readers can judge the outcomes themselves if the outcomes are reasonably equally likely.
The idea of creating pictures of people’s faces from their genomes might have a number of uses and that too especially in the forensic labs. It will make it easy for the science, creating the faces of people and reconstructing the faces of a perpetrator from any genetic cells whatever they might have left behind such as the blood and the body fluids. These will allow police to check the face of the criminal indulged in the cases of rape, assault, and murder. The idea will also be helpful in recognizing and identifying the victims who have been burned with acid attacks or maimed. Moreover, the unsolved cases could be reopened if proper samples would be available.
According to Dr. Venter, it is quick to the point out, that this technology has many other implications among them for secrecy purposes. He stated that the genomic information should be treated as someone’s personal information, even if the information is presented in the anonymous sequence of the letters. This, in turn, raises the possibility of people who may no longer be willing to disclose their genetic information.