Identifying the Nameless: How Advances in Forensic Science are Leaving No One Behind Jack Logan When reflecting on his participation in the development of the atomic bomb, one of the most revolutionary and devastating scientific advancements in human history, J. Robert Oppenheimer remarked: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Consumed with regret over his research contributions, he spent the better part of the rest of his life campaigning against the bomb. This tale, though compelling in its tragedy, is not a unique one. In our Twenty-First Century, we, too, are observing revolutionary technologies that are threatened by perversion for nefarious ends. Equally, however, many of these new fields have the potential to be used for good, such as forensic science. The cornerstone of the modern discipline of forensic science is DNA analysis, which was pioneered by British scientists in 1984, originally conceived as a means of resolving paternity disputes and reuniting distant relatives.
This burgeoning tool was first applied to a criminal investigation in 1985 (though this was a marathon process of over a year) with supervising scientist Sir Alec Jeffreys later lamenting that “it took a lot of DNA, and a lot of effort to get a result from a DNA sample. The real problem was that in most crime scene samples, you knew that human DNA was in there – you just didn’t have a technology sensitive enough to type it.” DNA analysis’ role in criminal investigation has led to popular perspective of this scientific procedure becoming warped. What is, in fact, a painstakingly long, laboratorybound process becomes a technological toy for Hollywood writers to play with. While procedural crime dramas of the Twentieth century had largely been set in either an interrogation room or a courthouse, the birth of NCIS in 2003, introduced forensic science to the popular imagination. Since the subsequent rise in popularity of Bones and
“I wandered name/less as a cloud” - Wordsworth
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