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One year ago I attended a Forensic Science Society meeting about research and wrote the post ‘Forensic Science Research – What Research?‘. That has been one of my most read pages and had many comments here and on Twitter.
One year on – I went to the Forensic Science Society ‘Forensic horizons’ meeting in Manchester. Not only was it a good chance to meet some forensic friends old and new it also gave an opportunity to hear talks from many in the forensic science research area.
What did I find? Was there more research than I thought or is it still a very difficult area to get funding for research? Well, a bit of both. In this post I will cover the positive aspects of the conference – some of the talks and areas of research that interested me. I will then think about improvements that could be made to the conference later.
Talks I enjoyed:
Sue Pope – Principle Forensic Services
Sue is a DNA expert (not my field – I was braving the biological world for a few hours) and was talking about management of DNA related cases. As well as providing a useful overview of the current DNA casework situation with some interesting case examples, Sue was one of few speakers to provide positive suggestions on improving the current situation. Proposals included a central procurement link to drive costs down for all for consumable items and reduce the amount of QA required at each lab (if each lab is provided with the same batch of consumables/reagents/swabs do they each need to undertake the same QA tests?). She also outlined the issues around sharing of information before cases, which can lead to delays and experts being asked to comment on reports whilst at the courthouse rather than having time to think and research. She proposed that there should be clear protocols around the sharing of data and reports and timelines for these.
This was an interesting and thought provoking talk.
Rob Bradshaw – Sheffield Hallam University
Rob is a PhD student at Sheffield Hallam University – working on advanced fingerprint methodologies. The work he presented was ‘Detection of exogenous and semi-exogenous substances of forensic interest in latent fingermarks by MALDI-MS’. He gave the example of cocaine – you can detect cocaine, which tells you that someone has been in contact with cocaine but if you can detect metabolites (such as benzoylecgonine) you can be more certain that that person was a user of the drug. Another very interesting development was the detection of condom lubricants in fingermarks with obvious uses in sexual assault cases. MALDI can also be used to differentiate between overlapping fingermarks by picking certain masses which are not present in both. This methodology is being incorporated into the Home Office fingermark development workflow and has a bright future.
Elisa van den Heuval – NFI, Netherlands
This was an interesting talk entitled ‘CSI The Hague’. The Netherland Forensic Institute (NFI) is involved in a partnership with big name electronics manufacturers, universities and local government to fund an innovative programme in crime scene analysis and digital capture. The following film gives a brief oversight of what they are doing.
This talk was a nice counterpoint to some talks which presented crime scene analysis a backwards and unscientific art.
Julie Evans – Roar Forensics
Ah, back on safe ground for me – toxicology. Julie talked about the screening of toxicology samples for new psychoactive drugs using HPLC-DAD and LC-MS techniques in her presentation ‘A Designer Life’. She explained how there has been a massive increase in the number of new drugs appearing over the past few years, which challenges labs analytical capability. Roar found an interesting way around some of the issues and have been granted a flexible scope 17025 accreditation. The analytical approach was validated rather than the specific test. The method involves a screen using HPLC-DAD and follows up with mass spectral confirmation. One issue in toxicology and drug analysis is the availability of reference materials, as the providers of such standards cannot keep up with the new drugs (73 new drugs were detected in Europe in 2012, up from 49 in 2011). Julie gave some interesting case examples and I found I had not heard of all of the drugs she was talking of, so a useful update for me.
I was flitting between sessions to try and see as much as I could, so I know I missed several talks I would have liked to see – several on human identity, drugs on banknotes and analysis of ignitable liquids at crime scenes. I was pleased with the amount of research being presented – mainly by universities with a few talks from bigger providers. I would still like to see more collaborations between forensic firms and universities – such as in my previous post on Accredited Research Providers.
I also enjoyed some talks on method validation and accreditation, useful for me to keep up to date with current requirements.
My overall feeling of the conference was positive.
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Agree with your comments for the Sue Pope talk – was well structured and set out clearly the fragmented nature of the current system – coming from a DNA perspective I found the detail of the elements of this fragmentation interesting and noted down the following points:
• Multiple forensic inputs through Force Pre-screening, Private FSPs (not DNA specific), DNA Analysis lab, and possible Universities (sample handling and information regarding sample handling in the context of the activities).
• Different types of statement produced – standard, streamlined, & specialist statistical.
• Difficult to order forensic report as events occur in space as well as time – the temporal order is not guaranteed.
• Another problem is DNA taken in isolation – need to have the context for how the DNA is found e.g. general background levels of DNA on the items to be able to properly report. Also, issue can arise as to when the DNA was deposited on the item to understand the order of events, and the origin of the DNA – e.g. saliva, blood or semen.
• DNA calculations for partials – differing FST from different Frequency databases.
@Andy555T
Hi Andy,
Thanks very much for the additional notes – very nicely summarised.
What were the other highlights of the conference for you?
Regards
Tom
Yes, the ‘CSI The Hague’ talk was one I attended too – was an enjoyable presentation with the potential for a future virtual reality type crime scene examination – will be interesting to see when/how/if aspects of this start to integrate into standard operational practices.
For DNA purposes, the talk “The development of next generation sequencing methods for routine forensic analysis” by Nicola Oldroyd from Illumina was impressive. I took from the talk that there was significant potential from a Forensic DNA perspective as the outputs would deliver a lot more detail than is currently provided by standard techniques. Rather than having to re-process for specific purposes, the Next Gen methods offer an all-in solution whereby the outputs would contain all the standard tests along with the ability to provide an estimate for ancestry/familial links and phenotype/traits. A further point being made was that the current usage of Capillary Electrophoresis instruments to generate data which is then interpreted through inference is analog, whereas the Next Gen methods provide digital data.
The talk by Andrew Miller MP “The future of forensic science in the UK” was interesting as a view of where the forensic science marketplace is at this point in time – highlighting the problems in a fairly uncompromising way e.g. “What we currently have is a chaotic landscape for forensic science resulting from a bad habit of short-sighted decision-making in Governments of all colours” but also describing potential ways forward for some of the aspects, such as a systematic approach to archiving materials and documents.
The conference had a full program – which is definitely a good thing – and there were a couple of time-slots where I would have liked to attend two of the concurrent talks!
Andy