Who'd be a forensic scientist, asks James Randerson? When a crime is reported, their social life has to take a back seat to the investigation. They see things on a daily basis that would have most of us being reunited with our breakfast. And when the case goes to court, lawyers who are paid several times their salary pick their professionalism apart.
No wonder the job fosters a gallows humour and camaraderie that you rarely see in other scientific disciplines. Here's a tour through some of the stories from the American Academy of Forensic Sciences annual meeting in Seattle, Washington, that won't make the headlines.
James Young, president elect of the AAFS and chief coroner of Ontario, Canada, described the difficulties of identifying bodies in Thailand after the Indian Ocean tsunami. "The decomposition problems were enormous," he said. In most cases, dental records were the only way to identify individuals. But when his team first arrived, at least finding their way to the makeshift morgue proved easy. "We just smelled our way there," he said.
Bob Barsley, a forensic odontologist at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, described similar problems in the aftermath of the New Orleans floods. But in that case the forensic teams also had to retrieve and identify bodies in coffins that had been dislodged from the ground by the floodwaters. One coffin floated 33 miles.
Forensic scientists have a genius for understatement. Take for example Diana Faugno of Escondido, California, who was presenting her investigation of injuries sustained by a woman during some rather unorthodox, but consensual, sexual practices. "The key point is for patient education that consensual floggation (sic) and strangulation do not fit the credo of safe behaviour." Thanks for letting us know.
Ana Lopez, of the Harris county medical examiner's office in Houston, Texas, was also rather restrained in her presentation about a 41-year-old man who had been killed by a radio-controlled helicopter. "There seems to be an inherent danger in the design and rotational movement of the blades," she said.
There are advantages to the job though, according to <a href=" http://biology.boisestate.edu/hampikian/"
">Greg Hampikian, an expert in forensic DNA analysis at Boise State University in Idaho. Only half jokingly, he said that his training had made him think twice about his actions in some situations in case they were misinterpreted later. For example, when he escorted an inebriated colleague to her hotel room at a conference he made sure the taxi driver waited for him outside. His professional experience told him that if anything happened to her, the last person to see her alive would inevitably be in the frame. "I didn't want to be that guy," he said.
This is James Randerson's final post from the AAFS conference in Seattle. You can read his earlier posts from the conference here, here, here and here
