22-year-old Apu lives with his family in a village located in Rajshahi's northern district in Bangladesh. He had worked as a medical assistant until recently. Both his father and grandfather worked as farmers.
The men in his family seemed to have shared a genetic mutation so infrequent it is believed to impact only a few number of families worldwide. . . They don't have fingerprints.
During the day of his grandfather, not having fingerprints was not a big deal. Apu said he does not think he ever "thought of it as a problem."
But over the past decades, the small grooves swirling around an individual's fingertips, properly identified as dermatoglyphs, have turned out to be the most collected biometric data of the world.
'No Fingerprint'
Fingerprints are used for everything, including passing through airports to casting votes for elections, and operating smartphones.
In 2008, during Apu's childhood, the National ID cards were introduced by Bangladesh for all adults, and the database necessitated a thumbprint.
The puzzled employees knew they did not have any idea how to issue the card to Amal Sarker, Apu's father. Finally, though, he received his card stamped with "NO FINGERPRINT" on it.
In 2010, fingerprints became mandatory for passports and driver's licenses to be issued. Following several attempts, Amal successfully got a passport by presenting a certificate issued by a medical board.
However, Apu's father never uses it, partly due to the fact that he is afraid of the problems he may encounter at the airport.
Constantly Embarrassing Experience
Even though riding a motorbike is important to his work as a farmer, he has never gotten a driver's license.
He shared he "paid the fee, passed the exam," although he was not issued a license as he could not provide a fingerprint.
Amal is carrying the receipt for the license fee payment, although it does not always help him whenever he is stopped. He has, in fact, been fined two times.
He explained his condition to both puzzled officers, he said, and held up his smooth fingertips so they could see them. But none of them waived the fine. "This is always an embarrassing experience for me," Amal said.
Mandatory
BBC News Reported in 2016, and the government made it compulsory "to match a fingerprint, with the national database" to buy a SIM card for a smartphone.
Apu said sellers appeared confused when he went to purchase a SIM card, and their software continued to freeze each time he put his finger on the sensor.
Unfortunately, he was not allowed the purchase, and all males in his family presently use SIM cards issued through his mother's name.
The infrequent condition possibly troubling the Sarker family is also known as "Adermatoglyphia." It initially turned out to be greatly known in 2007 when Swiss dermatologist Peter Itin was contacted by a female individual in the country during her late 20s who was experiencing a problem entering the United States.
Her face matched the picture on her passport, although customs officers were unable to document any fingerprints as she did not have any.
Upon investigation, Itin discovered that the woman and eight of her family members had a similar strange condition, flat finger pads and a decreased number of sweat glands in their hands.
Professor Itin, in collaboration with another dermatologist Eli Sprecher and graduate student Janna Nousbeck evaluated the DNA of 16 family members, seven with fingerprints and nine with none.
Explaining their finding to BBC, Prof. Itin said isolated cases are relatively rare, and no more than few families have been documented.
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