Little receptacles of the eyelashes, skin flakes, blood, hair and toenail clippings of a thousand people, packaged into small portable fireworks the likes of which are usually used to dispense streamers into the air during celebrations.
Upon leaving an area with which a person does not wish to remain associated, a DNA party popper is deployed, filling the area with a soiree of assorted genetic dust and debris, thus drastically reducing the value of forensically collected genetic evidence at the scene and protecting the privacy of those who have been in attendance, without needing to resort to the inconvenience of shrink-wrapping one's entire body in advance.
The idea can be extended to a line of other products including; genetic hairspray, skin flake enriched hand-cream, saliva infused chewing gum, blood mist vaporisers and a line of stylish clothing marinated in semen.-- idris83, Jan 19 2011 [ ] Most, if not all, of the samples collected will belong to people who unequivocally weren't there.-- FlyingToaster, Jan 19 2011 [+]-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jan 19 2011 A thousand? I'd have thought you could get at least a few million samples into a party popper.
[FT] Surely that's the point - to overload the forensic services with so many samples that it becomes impossible to choose a particular one and say "this DNA was left behind by a person who was physically present at the scene"?-- Wrongfellow, Jan 19 2011 Nice idea - although collecting DNA may be tricky considering someone offering their DNA to such a service is inviting attention by the police. Maybe some kind of underground lunatic-fringe civil rights movement could recruit impressionable young students using promises of free beer or hot-dogs for anyone willing to provide a suitable sample of hair/skin/blood/other of themselves.-- zen_tom, Jan 19 2011 Recruit some cleaners, and get them to give you some dust from the vacuum cleaner in every home or office they clean.-- Wrongfellow, Jan 19 2011 Even better if you collect the DNA from prisons. Rounding up the usual suspects, then, would be a snap.-- ldischler, Jan 19 2011 Too bad we don't have a 'public: evil' category anymore.-- RayfordSteele, Jan 19 2011 Would a hat-mounted DNA assortment aerosol spray running continuously not be more discrete?-- pocmloc, Jan 19 2011 In addition to the rapid rate that DNA is analyzed, this highlights one of the glaring errors of most TV forensic programs. That is they never find DNA evidence that is unrelated to the scene. It might not be the criminals, but apparently the person leaving it was at the scene sometime.
This is fine if it's semen, or a clump of hair ripped out by a victim, but relatively improbable if it's a single hair found on clothing. Given normal human contact, public transit, shared clothes washing facilities (laundromats), shared conference room chairs, etc. many of those hairs or skin cells or the like are going to be from sources elsewhere.
In real life, testing is only going to occur on this sort of random sample when there is a high probability that it came from someone who is suspected for other reasons-- MechE, Jan 19 2011 Fuck I need to watch more TV.-- daseva, Jan 19 2011 you really need to minimise your use of the word "fuck" for comedic effect.-- po, Jan 19 2011 How would minimizing it lead to more comedic effect?-- RayfordSteele, Jan 24 2011 random, halfbakery