Next time you buy a designer shirt, be sure to check the label. What you don't see may surprise you. Hidden within the ink or fibers of that shirt could lie an authentication device made not of plastic or metal, but of DNA.
"DNA has become the gold standard, the highest barrier to product counterfeiting, diversion, and piracy," says Julia Hunter, executive vice president of Applied DNA Sciences in Los Angeles. In this case, though, the term gold is both literal and figurative. The International Chamber of Commerce estimates that 7% of the world's trade goods at any given time are fakes, draining $350 billion (US) annually from legitimate businesses.
Though DNA security methods are too new to have yet been pivotal in convicting counterfeiters in court or breaking up fraud rings, it is only a matter of time. Hunter and the technology's other champions envision unique DNA markers being ...
