Current Affairs Journal: Fourth Entry

To start off I’d like to give you guys a proper definition of forensic sciences. According to the Staffordshire University forensic sciences can be described as sciences that were solely created for “law-related purposes”. It is supposed to provide “impartial scientific evidence” that can then be used in court to help investigate a case. Forensic sciences, as the name already suggests, consists of many different sub branches. Some of these are “Forensic Chemistry”, “Forensic Biology”, “Forensic Pathology” but also branches that draw from geology/psychology/ such as “Forensic Botany”. For those who have not yet understood, Forensic Sciences is what you see happening at crime scenes or labs in crime TV shows.

But when exactly did people decide that they needed SOMETHING, anything really, that could help them solve crimes? When I talk about crimes, I don’t necessarily mean murder or blackmail but everything that is against the law and needs to be investigated with the use of forensic sciences.
An exact point for the birth of forensic sciences is very difficult to find. Still, the first evidence of the use of fingerprints can already be found 700 BC, and even earlier. These fingerprints were used on clay tables to make “business transactions”, which can most probably be compared to a person’s signature or a receipt today.

Only in the 19^th century (70s and 80s)  fingerprints started to be used in the investigation of murder. The first two people that tried to use fingerprints to identify people were Sir Edward Richard Henry and Sir Francis Galton. Galton was one of the first people to observe fingerprints and consider them as a mean of identification in 1888. He only published his book on fingerprints four years later (1892), though. Sir Edward Henry developed his own classifying system in 1896 and it became the standard for fingerprinting techniques all over the world and has been used by detectives working for Scotland yard since 1901.

Now let’s go back in time a few years and look at something that actually happened before Henry and Galton came up with their brainchild (I didn’t want to confuse you by mentioning it in between the fingerprinting history). Around 1813 Mathiew Orfila published a book on toxicology (first book on toxicology ever!). He is considered „the father of toxicology“. But…what is toxicology? Bear with me. I’ll make you understand what a big deal the birth of toxicology actually is. Toxicology is a study that tries to find out how poisonous substances affect the human body. Toxicologists try to find out how the body is affected by poison, how it reacts, what symptoms are caused by poisoning and how a poison can be detected. Therefore, Forensic Toxicology deals with the detection of such substances (can be poison, drugs, chemical substances,…) in body fluids or hair (CAREFUL: Toxicology is not to be mistaken with drug analysis!).  Without Orfila we would be unable to detect any kind of poison or drug in blood, urine, or hair. Without his wit that helped prove that a lady killed her husband with arsenic, who knows how forensic sciences might have developed.

If we take another big step from where we are now in time and travel to the 1830s we will discover that a man called Henry Goddard made a very important discovery. He was the first person to compare different bullets in order to solve a crime. At this point in time, people only focused on visible flaws or indents on the bullet. But in 1920 Calvin Goddard invented a comparison microscope that was able to identify bullets and match them with their respective shell casings. In the 1970s a method to discover gunshot residue and therefore identify the person who fired a bullet was invented. I think it is quite safe to say that the geniuses Calvin and Henry Goddard founded “ballistics”.

While Calvin and Henry Goddard laid the foundation of ballistics, a man called Edmond Locard also managed to do a revolutionary thing. He was the first person to ever establish a police crime laboratory in Lyon, France in 1910.

One of the next milestones in forensic sciences was the discovery of DNA profiling. The person responsible for this success was Sir Alec Jeffreys. With the help of DNA profiling people can be identified by looking at certain sequences of their genes. The DNA of every person is unique (apart from the DNA of identical twins) and therefore their DNA can be compared to the DNA found in gathered evidence. In 1985 DNA profiling was first used in the UK and two years later it was first used in a criminal court in the United States.

In the 20th century forensic sciences really started to “flourish”. In the mid-1900s different tests to analyse body fluids (blood, saliva, semen) were developed  as well as psychological profiling techniques in the 80s. Also, the very first National Criminal DNA Database was established in London.

Well then, now you know a little more about forensic sciences. Even though there is much more to talk about concerning the entire history and development of these sciences this is enough information to give you an overview. It is more than enough to make you understand how long people have already worked on the development and improvement of forensic sciences until today.