Genetic mugshot recreates faces from nothing but DNA
newscientist.com
Genetic mugshot recreates faces from nothing but DNA
1–10 of 26 posts
Re: Genetic mugshot recreates faces from nothing but DNA
#2The first step to getting rid of ugly people, humanely. /s
Re: Genetic mugshot recreates faces from nothing but DNA
#3racist
Re: Genetic mugshot recreates faces from nothing but DNA
#4This is more like a facial composite[1] than a mug shot[2]. A mug shot is a photo of an identified person. A facial composite is a synthetic graphic of an unidentified person. The distinction is important because a facial composite is an investigative tool use to identify a suspect, and a mug shot is not.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_composite [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mug_shot
Re: Genetic mugshot recreates faces from nothing but DNA
#5It's eerie how accurate they recreated her nose. It'll be interesting to see how soon this takes off
Re: Genetic mugshot recreates faces from nothing but DNA
#6The first step to getting rid of ugly people, humanely. /s
[deleted]
Re: Genetic mugshot recreates faces from nothing but DNA
#7We are getting close to the yearly annoyance that is April fools' day, but this seems legitimate (a day would be fine, but it's starting to be more like a month, so I had to check that the New Scientists is published weekly). The article somewhat exaggerates the performance, though, by showing the copy-pasted hair, ears and earring (in gray). The PLOS paper (http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...) doesn't show any of those. Ears in particular, seem a logical next target.
Re: Genetic mugshot recreates faces from nothing but DNA
#8"One day, the technique may even allow us to gaze into the faces of extinct human-like species that interbred with our own ancestors."
I don't know how accurate that statement is. They can predict human faces because they can look at examples of DNA and the paired human face, they would have to use unsupervised machine learning for extinct species and have no real way to validate it.
Re: Genetic mugshot recreates faces from nothing but DNA
#9It's sort of like our earlier generations' expectations of privacy were set only by security-through-obscurity.
Re: Genetic mugshot recreates faces from nothing but DNA
#10It would be helpful to see more validation examples like the photograph of the former New Scientist reporter shown with the article. I wonder how we would judge the resemblance if the photographs hadn't shown the additional gray outline (complete with earring in the same design!) with the computer-generated images.
I know plenty of examples of people from the same family lineage (siblings or first cousins) who grew up in different countries, and there is considerable influence of diet and other factors of childhood environment on people's appearance. For the computer-generated images, presumably the image-generating software is choosing a central-tendency value for the facial features predicted by the genetic samples, but for forensic purposes it would be important to know the "reaction range" for each gene assembly, as that reaction range may be quite large. For example, my two American nieces who are monozygotic twins were brought up in the same household by the same parents, but they do not look indistinguishably "identical," but rather can be told apart readily by their parents and other close relatives and told apart with careful thought by other people who know them. Genes have never been the whole story about how people look.
German monozygotic twins Otto and Ewald, who pursued two different sports and ended up with very different physiques,[1] are a classic example in genetics classes of how genes are not completely destiny for personal appearance.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=Otto+Ewald
http://thesameffect.com/check-out-identical-twins-otto-and-e...