Forensics Advance !

The police forensics division plays a big part in television crime stories and in real life scenarios it has solved many high profile cases, but it does have limitations and one of them is the cost.   If our home is burgled we expect the cops to dust the house for fingerprints and seek DNA samples everywhere the burglar may have touched.

This is very much a " hit or miss " process.   The results of DNA swabs will not be known until much later when the laboratory crew have done their job and that investigation of each swab will take about four hours, and cost somewhere between thirty and sixty dollars.    No wonder crime investigations reserve DNA testing to important criminal cases.

That is about to change, thanks to a break through made by Australian researchers.  They have discovered a dye that highlights the presence of DNA at a crime scene rather than just swabbing blindly on a best practice basis and making good assumptions.    This dye reverses that process.  Applying the dye to a door handle will reveal if DNA is present immediately because it will fluoresce  instantly.  The laboratory people will then deliver the identity of that DNA match quickly and at reduced cost.

Crime laboratories reveal that criminals have another problem to worry about.  It takes more than a mere touch to leave identifiable DNA and some people leave more of a deposit than others.  They are known as " shedders " and - curiously - men shed more DNA than women.   A clever criminal who repeatedly washes his hands would leave a lesser DNA print than a person who ignores that cleansing process, but DNA is now a more useful way of tracking the perpetrators of  crime.

The fact that DNA analysis is both quicker and cheaper because the number of swabs needed to be tested are now reduced means it will be a tool of more crime investigations, and as crime is committed by a hard core of criminals the data base of DNA is ever widening.  It is one of the tenets of policing that every criminal always leaves something behind at a crime scene.

DNA is present in many forms.   If the criminal is a smoker, a discarded cigarette butt will deliver a DNA sample.  Even urinating will deliver the identity to a crime researcher and if the bandit is nervous the sweat from any part of the body will respond to this new dye.  Every minute he remains on the crime scene will accentuate the risk.

The testing authorities are moving ever closer to the "Holy Grail ".   The air we exude from our lungs when we breathe contains DNA samples and when this settles on the surfaces within a room we may eventually be able to clearly identify individuals.  Crime investigations of the future may not need to find something the criminal actually touched.  The mere presence at the crime scene would provide that identification !