Why not just cut them open and count the rings?
The first big test for GINA? Really?
The DNA test does not reveal an age, but it can reveal whether the player is the son of his claimed parents. Players have been known to find families willing to lend a younger child’s birth certificate so that a player can appear younger.
Miguel Sano, a top prospect in the Dominican Republic, was given DNA tests and a bone-scan procedure to help confirm that he was 16, he said in a telephone interview from his hometown, San Pedro de Macoris.
The DNA tests were conducted on Sano and his parents to determine if he was their son, he said. Sano’s sister underwent the bone scan as well, to help confirm that she was his older sister, and not a younger sibling whose birth certificate was used to falsify Sano’s age.
“In the eyes of baseball, there’s a huge difference between 16 and 19 years old,” said an international scout for a major league team. “It’s night and day. This is a runaway train they’re trying to put a lasso around.”
As ever, youth is wasted on the young. Play them off, son.
I work as an Assistant Professor in the Duke University Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy (although this site and its content are my own).
In 2007 I became the fourth subject in Harvard geneticist George Church's Personal Genome Project. As the PGP moves forward, I am chronicling the dawn of personal genomics, that is, people obtaining their genomic information for whatever reason(s) and figuring out what to do with it. I am interested in the relevant technologies and especially the attendant privacy and other ethical/legal/social issues.
This blog may also discuss some of my non-genome interests or, to paraphrase Dwight Yoakam, "Guitars, Cadillacs, hillbilly music, etc etc."
The header image comes from the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange's multimedia performance piece, "Ferocious Beauty: Genome."