A BIT OF FORENSIC SCIENCE HISTORY
Some forms of what we would now call forensic medicine were practiced as far back as the fifth century. During the next thousand years there were many advances in science, but only forensic medicine was practiced to any great extent. The science of toxicology was one of the first “new” forensic sciences to emerge. In an early case, Mr Lefarge died under mysterious circumstances and his wife fell under suspicion. The French scientist Mathieu Orfilia, in 1840, examined Lafarge’s remains and determined that he had ingested arsenic. He further showed that the source of the arsenic could only have been poisoning, and his wife was subsequently convicted of the crime (Wilson and Wilson, 2003). The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw considerable advances in the science of personal identification. As police photography had not been developed and fingerprints weren’t being used, methods of reliably tracking a person either through the police process or during incarceration were needed. Enter Alphonse Bertillon, a French criminologist, who developed a method of recording physical features of a person in such a way that the record would be unique to that person, referred to as anthropometry or Bertillonage, after its creator. He developed a set of precise measuring instruments to be used with his method. The Bertillonage system became very popular throughout Europe and the United States. It became widely used in US prisons, which needed a way to track the prisoners. The Bertillon system was plagued by problems of reproducibility and was finally discredited in the United States Penitentiary (USP) Leavenworth in Kansas. In 1903, William West was admitted to the prison to serve a sentence. When he was measured using the Bertillon system, it was found that a man with the name William West with virtually the same set of measurements was already at the prison! This sounded the death knell for Bertillonage and opened the door for the study of fingerprints. Bertillon used fingerprints in his system but didn’t have a good way to organize them for mass searches (Wilson and Wilson, 2003). Dr Juan Vucetich, a Croatian who lived in Argentina and worked for the La Plata police force, conceived of a method of fingerprint classification in 1894 that provided for 1,048,576 primary classifications of fingerprints. As history and culture would have it, his work was largely unheard of in Europe until much later. Sir William Herschel, a British officer in India and Henry Faulds, a Scottish medical doctor, both studied fingerprints as a scientific endeavor to see whether they could be used reliably for identification. In 1901, Sir Edward Henry devised a fingerprint classification system still used today to categorize sets of fingerprints and store them for easy retrieval (Thorwald, 1964). Pioneers, such as Alexandre Lacassagne and his protege Edmund Locard, set the practical and philosophical foundations for much of the developing forensic sciences. Located convinced the police department in Lyon, France, to give him two small rooms and two helpers, starting what would be the world’s first forensic science laboratory in 1910. Modern blood and body fluid typing got its start around 1900 when Karl Landsteiner showed that human blood came in different types, and his work led to the ABO blood typing system. This work, in turn, led to the discovery of other blood antigen systems such as Rh, MnSs, and the Lewis systems. White blood cell antigen systems were also discovered. From these discoveries came the forensic typing of blood to help distinguish one individual from another (Nuland, 1988). After Watson and Crick discovered the structure and functions of DNA in the early 1950s, it wasn’t until Sir Alec Jeffries developed the first forensic DNA typing method, which he coined, regrettably, “DNA fingerprinting,” in 1984 that forensic DNA technology was born. The work of Kary Mullis in the 1980s led to the discovery of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), the way our bodies reproduce DNA. This discovery led to Mullis’ being awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (Malmstrom, 1997). In the early part of the twentieth century, Goddard popularized the comparison microscope, which is two standard microscopes joined by an optical bridge. This revolutionized the comparison of bullets, cartridges, toolmarks, hairs, and fibers. Microscopy is the mainstay of forensic science laboratories and includes newer methods, such as the scanning electron microscope. Several professional forensic organizations help forensic scientists keep current and membership can convey many benefits, not the least of which is meeting other forensic scientists and developing contacts. Many of these organizations have journals associated with them. Refer to “On the Web: Professional Forensic Organizations” for more information about these groups.
