Twila Brase was not always the kind of person who hands out politically charged propaganda in airports. On a first meeting at her modest office in a shopping plaza in St Paul, Minnesota, she seems more like the unassuming nurse she was back in 1995 -before she began her second life as a bioethical gadfly, and before she had started making YouTube videos that accuse her state of commandeering the DNA of children as "government property" through widespread newborn screening programmes. Her voice is quiet and level. It is difficult to write her off as a conspiracy theorist: she simply doesn't sound like one, even when, 4.5 minutes into making the case against screening, she suggests that "some researchers" might be trying to convince the state to test day-old infants for genes linked to "a tendency towards violence". But Brase may have brought newborn screening and associated research in Minnesota to the point of crisis with her allegations. By tapping into ideological veins that run deep in the United States - wariness of government intrusion and fears about threats to privacy - she could influence the fates of many studies that seek to use human samples from state biobanks, not to mention the fates of thousands of children with rare diseases. Brase has a bent for the hyperbolic: her website features, among other touches, a photo of an infant in a shirt that reads, "Help! The Gov't Has My DNA". She aso bends tine trutin at. times to make her points. The claim that the state might test for "propensity to violence", for example, is based on a self-published proposal by a student at the University of Connecticut School of Law in Hartford (go.nature.com/ uodhkh) - hardly an imminent programme.
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