An ad campaign used DNA found on discarded cigarette butts to construct digital portraits to publicly shame litterbugs
Next time you’re about to toss a cigarette butt on the ground, consider this freaky fact: It takes less than a nanogram (or less than one billionth of the mass of a penny) of your dried saliva for scientists to construct a digital portrait that bears an uncanny resemblance to your very own face. For proof look to Hong Kong, where a recent ad campaign takes advantage of phenotyping, the prediction of physical appearance based on bits of DNA, to publicly shame people who have littered.If you walk around the city, you’ll notice portraits of people who look both scarily realistic and yet totally fake. These techno-futuristic most-wanted signs are the work of ad agency Ogilvy for nonprofit Hong Kong Cleanup, which is attempting to curb Hong Kong’s trash problem with the threat of high-tech scarlet lettering. It’s an awful lot like the Stranger Visions project from artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg, who used a similar technique a couple years back to construct sculptural faces as a way to provoke conversation around what we should be using these biological tools for. In the case of Hong Kong’s Face Of Litter campaign, the creative team teamed up with Parabon Nanolabs, a company out of Virginia that has developed a method to construct digital portraits from small traces of DNA. Parabon began developing this technology more than five years ago in tandem with the Department of Defense, mostly to use as a tool in criminal investigations. Parabon’s technique draws on the growing wealth of information we have about the human genome. By analyzing saliva or blood, the company is able to make an educated prediction of what you might look like. Most forensic work uses DNA to create a fingerprint, or a series of data points that will give a two-dimensional look at an individual that can be matched to pre-existing DNA samples. “We’re interested in using DNA as a blueprint,” explains Steven Armentrout, founder of Parabon. “We read the genetic code.”
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