ABSTRACT
Columbia broadcasting system (CBS) is a US network of private TV and broadcasting stations 60 Minutes aired a dramatic segment in the fall of 2007 that portrayed a direct and sharp challenge to the claims-making about such ancestry testing. The segment began with Vy Higgensen, an African-American woman from New York's Harlem triumphantly affirming her connection to 'new kin'. In 1993, a British forensic scientist published what is perhaps the first DNA test explicitly acknowledged to provide 'intelligence information along ethnic lines for investigators of unsolved crimes. On January 5, 2006, the president of the United States signed into law HR 3402, the Department of Justice Re-authorization bill of the Violence Against Women Act of 2005. In one lab that permitted its procedures to be studied by a medical anthropologist, ancestry percentages were generated by formulas that compare the relative frequency of markers between selected populations of recent European, African, and Native American descent.
