Heather Dewey-Hagborg has used a cigarette butt, a wad of gum and some hair to reconstruct theoretical faces of total strangers. Her project, Stranger Visions, uses genetic flotsam and a program she wrote herself in order to construct the faces, based on only three criteria: gender, eye color, and maternal ethnicity.
She stresses that this process is inaccurate and the faces may at best present a "family resemblence" to the owner of aforementioned genetic material, and that DNA analysis is far less clear-cut than it seems on TV. "There's an 80% chance that this person has brown eyes and 20% chance that they have green eyes," she explained to Co.EXIST. "You have to make that call."
Numerous environmental factors also have a hand in deciding which genes will and will not be expressed; even something as simple as food the mother ate while pregnant can affect the appearance of an individual later in life. Sometimes, even if a person has the genetic code for a certain appearance, they may not demonstrate it physically.
Another problem arises from the code itself, which Dewey-Hagborg calls "problematic" due to the process of assigning traits based on ethnicity. She fed the computer images of people of different backgrounds, but that simple action has already resulted in a mutlitude of cultural biases. She said that databases of human faces often come from college students in a particular region of the world, which may skew the images toward a less diverse demographic. Still, her program has no other way of determining what mouths and lips look like based on maternal ethnicity.
The Stranger Visions project really makes one think about the amount of genetic material we shed daily, and how it can be used in the future. The software is incomplete now, but how many years will it be before a program can spit out all the possible traits a person may express, based solely on their DNA? Compared to police forensics labs today, which can determine hair and eye color from a sample, it doesn't seem too far off.
Dewey-Hagborg has plans to add more traits, such as freckles and predisposition to obesity.
