It started when a Building Operations department employee at Woman's Hospital in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, returned from several weeks vacation to find that someone had "placed urine in his toolbox [1]." After he complained, a memo was circulated to twenty-five employees, informing them that if someone didn't own up, then DNA testing would be carried out. Anyone who refused to submit to testing would be fired.
Following legal advice, hospital supervisor Stan Shelton said that this practice was "the next step in using technology to help solve a workplace incident"; but attorney Jill Craft believes that doing this would "[violate] someone's right to privacy."
Civil liberties aside, it's not an inconsiderable cost to do the testing, either: the hospital budget would be down $25,000. It takes first-grade level math to break that down into the cost-per-"suspect": $1000 each. Is it really worth spending that amount of money to find out who urinated in someone's toolbox?
And even then, would such testing be successful? A little bit of online research found an abstract for an article stating that "urine collection can be considered as a useful method of obtaining DNA [2] in large cohort studies." The sample used in that experiment was far greater than twenty-five, though; and crucially, the urine was frozen. DNA degrades over time, so I doubt that a successful conclusion will be reached in the Baton Rouge case, in which the urine could have been in the toolbox for up to several weeks. It's twenty-five grand pissed up the wall, I reckon.
The first thing I thought when reading the article was not about ethics, I'm ashamed to say, but about PoopReporting. "What if it had been shit and not piss. What then? Hmm?"
Well, it's even harder to extract DNA from feces [3]. You would need to sample elephantine amounts because of the small quantity of DNA present and the cellular degradation that has already taken place. In fact, according to the Forensic and Profiling Centre at Trent University, Ontario, "Fecal samples must be collected as fresh as possible within 24 hours of defecation otherwise the DNA will be severely degraded [4]."
I'm not one to condone turd terrorism, believe me. But given the overreaction and potential waste of funds by the hospital administration, I wish someone had shat in the toolbox instead.
