GESTIÓN EN SALUD PÚBLICA: Kuwait to establish national DNA record

Kuwait to establish national DNA record

by Xavier Symons | 30 Apr 2016 |

In a world first, the State of Kuwait will require all citizens and visitors to provide DNA samples to government authorities.

The new security measure, which was approved by the nation’s government in July 2015, mandates that all visitors must provide police with a DNA record (most likely in the form of a standard cheek swab) before they enter the country.

Government officials say that the new requirement will be a very useful means of combatting crime, as it allows for the matching of DNA specimens from crime scenes with the DNA code of any member of the population.

“DNA tests have proven very effective over the past decade and have been used in solving many crimes by matching biological evidence collected from crime scenes with databases”, an anonymous official told the Kuwait Times.

Officials suggest that the samples will be stored securely and

The government intends to store the specimens of visitors, as well as that it will be hard for even lab staff to access sensitive identifying information about the source of the sample.

International NGO Human Rights Watch has stridently criticised the new legislation. In a statement released when the laws were first approved, Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson said,

“Many measures could potentially be useful in protecting against terrorist attacks. I suppose videotaping every user of a public toilet could be useful too, but that kind of intrusion is hardly necessary or proportionate, and neither is compulsory DNA testing.”

Under the law, individuals who refuse to provide a sample could face up to 7 years in prison

- See more at: http://www.bioedge.org/bioethics/kuwait-to-establish-national-dna-record/11852#sthash.5yiZjGiL.dpuf

Although it has been called the world’s most dangerous idea, transhumanism probably provokes more ridicule than fear. Uploading one’s brain onto the internet or talk of thousand-year life spans seems to defy common sense.

Nonetheless, my theory is that transhumanism is the logical outcome of a lot of contemporary bioethical theory. So developments in transhumanism are worth paying attention to.

The biggest story at the moment is the quixotic campaign of the head of the Transhumanist Party, Zoltan Istvan, for president of the United States. He is a philosophy and religious studies graduate of Columbia University and has worked as a journalist for the National Geographic Channel.

Mr Istvan has been running a blog on the Huffington Post for a while about his campaign which aims to make the platform of his party more plausible. In the latest post he defines transhumanism as “the radical field of science that aims to turn humans into, for lack of a better word, gods”. So while transhumanism is resolutely atheistic, it has religious aspirations.

And unlike Richard Dawkins and other militant atheists, Istvan argues that our responsibility is to transcend evolution. He writes: “the human body is a mediocre vessel for our actual possibilities in this material universe. Our biology severely limits us. As a species we are far from finished and therefore unacceptable… Biology is for beasts, not future transhumanists.”

It’s a curious development. While many prominent scientific thinkers want to abolish God and treat man as one beast amongst many, transhumanists want to abolish evolution and recreate God (or gods).