Over the course of our project we have spoken to a wide range of experts, from the crime scene to the court room,
to help develop our forensic toolkit into something we hope will have useful real world applications.
This outreach has included meeting some of the world’s best forensic researchers to discuss ideas, defence lawyers to
find out what criteria our toolkit would need to meet to be used in a court of law, we even met with an award winning crime
author to hear his thoughts on the importance of the public perception of forensic science. We were very lucky to chat with a
crime scene investigator, to draw from his years of experience in the field and find out whether he thought our toolkit would be
useful, practical, and an improvement on current techniques. Finally, we met with manufacturers to find out a bit more about
that side of designing a forensic toolkit.
Towards the tail end of our project we gained a spot on BBC Radio Scotland and on Scottish TV News (STV) to promote our project,
iGEM and synthetic biology to a wider audience.
News Reel
Meeting with Professor Sue Black
Thurs 28 May
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Meeting with Professor Niamh Nic Daéid
Mon 1 June
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SULSA Talks
Mon 8 June
This was our very first opportunity to pitch our project idea,
which we delivered to the other two Scottish iGEM teams. It was great to see what the other
teams were doing and take part in some fun team building activities!
Meeting with Kenny Laing
Mon 15 June
Kenny Laing works for the Scottish Police Services Authority
in Forensic Services where he is team manager overseeing four Mark Enhancement laboratories.
He highlighted to us why fingerprint ageing is so difficult, namely due to the sheer amount of
factors which can affect fingerprint composition, but also stressed how useful a tool with such
capabilities would be.
Photoshoot at Mr Drew Photography!
Sat 20 June
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Meeting with Stuart Macbride
Thurs 25 July
Award-winning, crime author Stuart Macbride was kind enough to spare some
of his time before receiving his honorary degree at the University of Dundee. He was able to give us
an exciting insight into the workings of the criminal mind and his intriguing writing process but
also explained how important it is to manage public expectations of Forensic Science.
Meeting with lawyers
Thurs 2 July
Mark Stewart QC and Brian McConnachie QC both operate in the High Court
of Justiciary and James Laverty is a solicitor and module organiser of Criminal Procedure and Advocacy
Diploma in Legal Practice at the University of Dundee. All three gentlemen unanimously agreed that
each element of our tool kit would be of most value being used in an investigative sense. This showed
that although they may not necessarily be used for providing evidence that would be presented in a
court of law, there is real potential for our devices to play key roles in the earlier stages of
investigations.
Meeting with CSI guy
Thurs 2 July
We were fortunate enough to speak with a Scenes of Crime Officer
who has experience working in a variety of environments. He was very enthusiastic about our BioSpray
idea, saying that an all in one tool such as ours would markedly improve the efficiency of crime
scene investigation since it would significantly reduce the time needed to perform a thorough
examination as well as the potential for contamination.
Meeting with Dr Lucina Hackman
Thurs 9 July
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Meeting with CAST rep
Wed 15 July
We met with Rory Downham a chemist from the Home Office Centre
for Applied Science and Technology (CAST),
carrying out work on fingermark detection and drugs detection methods,
including in-house original research and collaboration with academic and
industrial partners.
Meeting with SelEx
Mon 3 Aug
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iGEM on the telly!
Fri 7 Aug
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Ethics
One reason why ethics is so important in the field of forensic science is because the criminal justice system relies so heavily on forensic evidence.
Forensic evidence can make or break a case and in doing so, have a great impact on the lives of others. If one piece of evidence is mishandled or misinterpreted,
it could lead to a person's life being changed dramatically or prevent justice from being served. Because the general public make up the jury, the public’s
perception of forensic science is incredibly important as it can have a big impact on the outcome of a court case. Some people in the general public may see
forensic evidence as absolute truth, without taking into consideration the error present in all scientific methods. Forensic scientists call this the ‘CSI effect’
because TV shows like this tend to overstate the capabilities of forensic techniques. In reality sometimes the evidence collected and presented is down to expert
interpretation rather than scientifically robust analysis. For example, blood spatter patterns, hair and fibre analysis, firearm and tool marks are commonly depicted
on CSI. These techniques rely on the judgment of individual experts and can’t really be validated with statistics. In other words, these techniques are not
particularly scientifically robust. So of course, results from tests such as these which can sway the jury are actually not reliable and this can lead to miscarriages
of justice which could happen to anyone. This is where the innocence project comes in. The Innocence Project is a non-profit legal organization that is committed
to exonerating wrongly convicted people. So far over 300 cases have been exonerated in the USA, of which 18 were on death row. And they state that 47% of the
exonerated cases were due to improper forensic science. This is one of the reasons we became so passionate about our project. We decided that we wanted to take
a different approach to forensics and put science first. We came up with the idea of creating a robust, useful and easy to use set of techniques for crime scene
analysis - our forensic toolkit, which we hope, can help prevent these wrongful convictions and bring perpetrators to justice.
