Call It the SyDNA Olympics

by Stewart Taggart

3:00 a.m. 7.Mar.2000 PST

SYDNEY, Australia -- If you buy official merchandise at this year's Sydney Olympics, you'll be taking home a piece of one of Australia's top athletes.

The ink derived from the undisclosed athlete's DNA has been placed on each piece of official Olympic merchandise to thwart counterfeiters. The ink is invisible, impossible to reverse-engineer, and easy to check with special scanners no larger than a garage door-opener.

In short, it's a biotechnology security tag.

The DNA was taken from a saliva swab, then copied and mixed with various proteins and enzymes to make the ink. Given that the human genome has something like 3 billion base pairs -- and only a random sample of this huge genetic combination was taken from the athlete ­-- the challenge to counterfeiters is daunting.

"Imagine trying to figure out a secret password using one sentence of one book in a massive library, when you don't even know which library to look in," DNA Technologies CEO Ron Taylor said.

The company is providing a variety of anti-counterfeiting measures to the Sydney Olympics.

Just in case counterfeiters might want to haunt Olympic practice fields, stealing water bottles and towels in a bid to get their own DNA samples, Olympics officials say the swab wasn't necessarily taken from a current Olympic athlete.

That means the universe of potential donors is huge, forcing counterfeiters to ferret out samples everywhere from nursing homes to suburban neighborhoods if they really want to go to the trouble of grabbing the DNA.

And that's before the virtually impossible task of cracking and reverse-engineering the ink ­-- assuming they get the right athlete.

Fledgling DNA-tagging technology already has been used to provide verification in some sports collectibles and limited edition art markets. But Taylor believes the Sydney Olympics will be the first time it's ever been used in a mass-market environment.

All told, the DNA tags are expected to add no more than a few cents to the sale price of the average item.

DNA ink is much less expensive than holograms, the main anti-counterfeiting measure used at the Atlanta summer games, Taylor said. What's more, counterfeiters are getting better and better at creating fake holograms, reducing their effectiveness.

The idea of using unique DNA sequences for generating nearly unbreakable security codes underscores the huge potential for advances in biotechnology beyond just the narrow fields of health care, he said.

Among other potential applications for the technology is sophisticated, tamper-proof individual product tagging to replace more commonplace bar codes. National currencies also could one day feature the technology,­ although adoption for these kinds applications is expected to be slow.

In the U.S. each year, counterfeiting is believed to cost legitimate businesses $200 billion in lost revenue. The general rule of thumb is that in any large-scale merchandise marketing effort, as much as 30 percent of goods sold may be fake.

Sydney Olympics officials haven't disclosed how much they hope to make through merchandise sales, so they can't predict potential losses from any counterfeiting. However, with the Sydney Olympics' financial outlook teetering between forecasts of red ink and black ink, merchandise sales will be important.

The system is based upon assembling small sections of DNA known as "oligomers," which are then encrypted in a laboratory through stringing together the As, Gs, Cs and Ts that comprise the alphabet of DNA. By scrambling the oligomer components, Taylor estimates trillions of potential combinations can be made.

DNA marking technology already has been used to authenticate art sold by American artist Thomas Kinkade, who marks his work with DNA to assure buyers. In addition, some limited-edition gel artworks sold by cartoon creator Hanna-Barbera also have been marked, as have some sports collectibles markets.

To protect against more traditional skullduggery, only three people know which athlete the DNA sample was taken from. Also, the location of the laboratory manufacturing the special ink is being kept secret, Taylor said.

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