In his most alarming and at the same time intriguing talk Erlich shows us how research participants can be identified from 'anonymous' DNA, highlighting the current gaps in genetic privacy as we enter to the brave new era of genetic information.

Yaniv Erlich is an assistant professor of computer science at Columbia University and a Core Member of the New York Genome Center. It is a joint position, one that aims to bridge the strong computer‐science communities at Columbia with the Genome Center's focused efforts on translating genomic research into patient care. Erlich is a former Fellow at MIT's Whitehead Institute, where he created DNA Sudoku, a sequencing strategy to find rare genetic variations, and lobSTR, a short tandem repeat profiler for personal genomes, while also constructing a genealogy tree linking 13 million people. Has a PhD in genomics and bioinformatics from Watson School of Biological Sciences
at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. He received his B.Sc. in computational neuroscience from Tel‐Aviv University.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx