Monday, October 20, 2008

Editor's Letter: Forensic Tools

Throughout the field of forensic science it seems that DNA is the "magic bullet". DNA is what everyone assumes is the main and most helpful way in solving pretty much any type of crime. DNA isn't always the "magic bullet". DNA has to be handled by a forensic scientist who knows what they are doing. If an inexperienced person is handling the DNA they could ruin all of its importance. Someone who is highly experienced and knows how to do the proper collection, analysis, reporting, and the chain of custody. Something has small as an investigator using contaminated gloves while handling DNA could destroy the DNA sample and make it useless to help solving the case.
DNA isn't the only tool that investigators use to help solve crimes. These high quality tools consist of scanning and imaging, and collection tools to gather evidence. High Tech vehicles come to certain crime scenes which carry certain evidence analysis's so that they can start being evaluated at the crime scene. Dick Warrington says that the basic and necessary crime scene evidence collection tools are tape, bags, powder, brushes, gloves, swabs, markers, scales, and lighting.
All of these things won't help assist solving a crime unless the evidence is collected and handled by highly trained professionals. If not there could be serious contamination and damaged to the evidence which would lead to investigators in a different track then they want. Solving a crime is simple as long as their is good evidence along with highly trained investigators and the right evidence collection tools.

http://www.forensicmag.com/articles.asp?pid=236

4 comments:

Geena said...

I thought that this article was well written, informative,
and showed us the significance of DNA. To improve the article, I think that you should have said who Dick Warrington was (is he a forensic scientist?) and even mention how long it takes to analyze evidence such as DNA. I enjoyed the article because this is a topic that we are currently going over in Forensics class.

laurabora said...

• Three aspects of the review that were particularly well presented were the way that she presented the article; it was very clearly presented and easy to understand. It was also a very interesting topic, and very thoroughly presented. Two suggestions on how the review could have been made even better were that I think she could’ve added a little bit more information and possibly to be organized better. I was impressed by the topic that she chose to write about.

Sam Benner said...

This article contained good information, and it was interesting to learn about 1. the fact that it takes so little for a DNA sample to be noted worthless after contamination, 2. the ways in which the DNA can be contaminated, and 3. the number of ways evidence can be collected and preserved to be kept without contamination. I thought it was a somewhat confusing article and could have been written better, but overall, I was intrigued by the article and it provided some good information

amack said...

I feel that this was a very good article, because it talks about the signifiance of DNA and the factors that have occured. By reading this article I think you should have added more information about the person that helped analyze DNA. Overall this was a good article and it gives enough information to understand the article.