The Family with No Fingerprints

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for FatPhil:

The family with no fingerprints:

Apu Sarker was showing his open palm to me on a video call from his home in Bangladesh. Nothing seemed unusual at first, but as I looked closer I could see the smooth surfaces of his fingertips.

Apu, who is 22, lives with his family in a village in the northern district of Natore. He was working as a medical assistant until recently. His father and his grandfather were farmers.

The men in Apu's family appear to share a genetic mutation so rare it is thought to affect only a small handful of families in the world: they have no fingerprints.

[...] over the decades, the tiny grooves that swirl around our fingertips - known properly as dermatoglyphs - have become the world's most collected biometric data. We use them for everything from passing through airports to voting and opening our smartphones.

[...] The rare condition likely afflicting the Sarker family is called Adermatoglyphia. It first became widely known in 2007 when Peter Itin, a Swiss dermatologist, was contacted by a woman in the country in her late twenties who was having trouble entering the US. Her face matched the photograph on her passport, but customs officers were not able to record any fingerprints. Because she didn't have any.

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.