Forensics Specialist Discusses a Discipline in Crisis

Solid scientific evidence can be crucial for solving crimes. But science may have been progressing too fast for the courts and the juries to keep up. The problem was symbolized by a ruling last year in which Mark Dwyer, a judge of the New York State Supreme Court, declared that a forensic-analysis technique known as low-copy-number DNA testing was inadmissible because there was no consensus in the scientific community that it was valid forensic tool. The technique, which consists of amplifying very small amounts of DNA to obtain a profile, has been used to get convictions in various countries but has been criticized as being susceptible to contamination and having problems with reproducibility.

To help to bridge the divide between law and lab, leading forensic scientists held a meeting with senior legal experts in London earlier this month.

Nature spoke to Niamh Nic Daéid of the University of Dundee, UK, who co-organized the meeting with fellow Dundee forensics expert Sue Black. One of Britain's leading forensic scientists, Nic Daéid works at Dundee's Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification...