Faking DNA evidence is now possible...and easy

"If there's one application of modern genetics that the public has not only accepted but embraced, it's the use of DNA testing in criminal investigations. Courts have accepted DNA evidence as definitive, and it's difficult to imagine a movie or TV show that focuses on law enforcement but declines to use DNA testing as a plot device. The reason is simple: given a valid DNA sample, the tests can match it to its source with probabilities that exclude the rest of our planet's population. Those probabilities still hold, but some researchers have now looked into whether it's possible to fake a valid DNA sample, and they have come up with a disturbing answer: just about any molecular biology lab has the tools to do so."  From Ars Technica article, "CSI Fraud: researchers craft fake DNA evidence"

So, you had to know that with the growth of technology the common (yet intelligent) criminal's ability to fake evidence was going to get better, too.  Well, as I've long expected to hear, it's possible to fake DNA evidence.  And it's apparently fairly easy for any properly set up lab to do. 

Ideas.

• Big syndicates or other criminal groups with the money/resources are going to be protecting themselves by slipping faked evidence into the crime scene (either when they commit the crime or perhaps into the evidence locker...although the latter option is far too complex to my way of thinking, given that you'd have to have someone in the lab and the evidence lock up who could access the physical evidence in both sites--including falsifying chain of evidence on the sealed evidence bags, which have to be replaced once open.) 
• Big syndicate or (etc.) might actually want to kill someone off and frame a rival.  Might also work well as a spy thriller concept.
• Your clever revenge-prone protagonist decides to jam the spokes of some entity's little red wagon with falsified evidence.
• Or a government agency is busy setting up a particular group for some subversive reason, say a coup in the works.
• Terrorists take on their targets by first spreading chaos and discontent by setting up people who are key players--say in the White House Administration, government bureaucracy in the National Security Agency, FBI or Homeland Security. 
• Your future world is run by a corrupt government which determines who are undesireables and proceeds to set them up with fake evidence to remove them from a supposedly utopian world and into exile.  (Perhaps they need workers in colonies off planet, and few volunteers.  Getting malcontents off the planet would be the 'best' solution to the government, and gaining a legal excuse would give them the moral high ground.)

 There are a number of possibilities, and I'm sure that reality will provide them in the future. 

Comments

[Adam Heine]

Wow, this is such important news for us sci-fi authors :-)

The tricky thing is, if it is really easy to fake, it might preclude the use of DNA evidence entirely, or at least put it in the same box as lie detector tests.

[charles gramlich]

Disappointing but inevitable. I didn't think it would happen so quickly, though