Time for some not very big data biotech

It appears that the US government has separated mothers and their children and doesn’t know how to get them back together again. In particular, this is extremely difficult if the children are under 2 and don’t know their family name (looking for someone identified only as “mommy” or “mia madre” is challenging.

I think a data company with some need to apologize to the world can make itself useful. It is not too hard to match 3000 children who are too young to speak and their mothers provided the mothers eagerly cooperate.

DNA fingerprinting is possible. Maternity and paternity tests are possible. taking all 6000 or so DNA fingerprints and matching parents and children requires a few person days at most of programming then a millisecond of the processing power available to, say, Facebook.

The problem of getting addresses for matched pairs of parents and children has been solved long ago provided one has permission from the parents.

If it isn’t done, it’s because they don’t care.

uodate: good news from a firm which needs some good publicity and is, for whatever reason, doing the right thing. I applaud MyHeritage . They are offering free DNA tests to get families back together.