Remember the first time you saw someone using a cell phone and it was soooo cool? And then you saw the same thing later and your eyes bugged out because it was a brick?
Yup, that’s exactly why I don’t do details about the tech in a book. I will gladly tell you how the science works, but I don’t like to discuss limitations and I don’t describe how they perform it in detail. If you want more on DNA and how the science is evolving, go check out part 1 of Writing with Science.
Let’s talk about things other than DNA because there’s a lot of science growing in those areas too
1 – Footprints. You’ll see on TV and in movies that they can tell someone is wearing the wrong size shoe. Well, we still can’t do that. It’s been used in court, but the science is pretty strong that we can’t get it right often enough. Places where shoes leave prints, like mud and snow, tend to contract and expand – so we can’t tell size with as much accuracy as readers and viewers have been led to believe. BUT we can tell where the person is putting their weight, and we can certainly tell what kind of footwear they were wearing. (Lots of manufacturers share treads though, so sometimes that’s helpful and sometimes not.) This is an area where the science is showing we don’t know as much as we thought we did!
2 – Collecting footprints from stranger places! We can now do more than just snap pics of footprints left in the dust, we can collect them and keep them for evidence with electrostatic dust print lifters. (Ask me the super simple way to see them!) I haven’t used this yet in a book but it’s super cool and I think it’ll go in the next NightShade book, Termination Dust. (Wait. Did I already reveal that title? Hmmm.) This is interesting science, because we’ve had it for a while, but many police stations and CSI units aren’t trained on these techniques, so evidence is getting lost. But my characters can definitely use this.
Staying ahead of the science also means staying ahead of how it’s getting used!
3 – Fingerprints! I had a police officer yell at me online for suggesting gold dust fingerprint lifting. He said he’d been “in forensic evidence for 30 years and had never heard of it.” A – he apologized later but B – see above, I also have to stay ahead of how it’s getting used. I’d known about this technique for a handful of years at that point, and someone performing this evidence collection was so far behind he called me a liar. That’s a problem for a real world day. This technique is not locally available – meaning you can’t walk into someone’s house and do it. You have to collect the print and bring it to the lab and use a specific chamber.
4 – Saliva. Oh, we can test the hell out of this now. Pillowcases from old murders can be used as evidence now. Like with bloodwork, the future is smaller and smaller samples, better and better data from those samples. And, maybe most importantly, finding those samples.
5 – Hair! Whoa, don’t get me started. This is a great one because as I write this, we are on the precipice of having hair protein analysis entered into court regularly as evidence. I’ve already used this in a book! In the past, hair evidence was looked at under a microscope and could only be claimed as ‘consistent with.’ That means, we can say it could be their hair, but we can’t say it is. (It also meant we could “rule out” or say it couldn’t be a person’s hair. Now, protein analysis can pinpoint a person by their hair. We each grow our own hair, so we each have a unique protein structure in that hair. We can now match it like DNA!
I always invite you to read my books, but if you like the science of these things and you’ve already read my stuff (There’s a LOT of this in the new Hangman’s Shadow series because they solve cold cases) then go check out these two other authors who use a lot of forward thinking science in their books too!
Andrew Mayne – Orbital and Station Breaker are favorites of mine!
Kendra Elliot – She had a forensic odontologist in her books. I read about one before I became one!
Happy reading!
