Upcoming
Guuest Speakers:
July 23rd:
Mrs Helen Clifton.
Future of bears.
August 28th:
Andy Nicholls. Using chemicals in your environment.
September 24th:
Brad Taylor. Believe in your dreams.
October 22nd: Mr Chris Temby:
Cochlear Awareness Network
A
review of our June guest speaker
D. N. A.
Last
month we were treated to a very interesting talk by ex-SAPOL detective
expert Barry England about the use of forensic profiling for the
accurate identification of “persons
of interest” with respect
to activities on the wrong side of the Law.
He
brought with him his two unobtrusive - but highly effective - off-siders,
Fred and Buckle (?), which he introduced and then pressed onto
our Fred and Basil., for
purposes which became obvious later.
It
appears that we are all a twisted helical mass of (different)
combinations of D.N.A. but
-as usual -
girls are even further different (surprise, surprise ! ).
In my youth (which is some time ago now!) I was led to believe
that girls were made of “sugar and
spice and all things nice”.
So it was a bit of a disillusionment to be informed that they are
basically all double helixes of mitochondrial deoxyribonucleic acid
chromosomes, albeit normally assembled in a characteristically
attractive format.
What’s more, they pass this on only to their daughters.
Talk about discrimination and inequality!
But Fred and Buckle can tell whose who, even within the daunting
miscellany of a feminine handbag.
Fred is a stick coated with absorbent material that collects
sweat (perspiration in the case of ladies), and Buckle carries a
lollipop head of the same stuff that collects saliva, and they have no
difficulty in detecting micro amounts thereof.
Their samples are transferred by pressure onto an absorbent card
and sent to the national Forensic Centre in
So if you are in the potential line-up, you haven’t got all that much
time to leave the country !
In which case the member who asked about finger prints and D.N.A.
on a knife pulled from some late lamented should maybe get moving.
A use of current interest of the technique outside the crim environment
is the identification of the soldiers of W.W.I
whose remains are
being disinterred in
Leah (I think it was) posed the most penetrating question by asking
- How many persons of
interest have been proven innocent
in
I suppose George Orwell might have strife disentangling all this D.N.A.
business from his Big Brother complex.
But then, that’s progress.
By the way, I did not
see Barry actually destroying the Fred swab and the Buckle lollipop that
he wished onto Fred Mole and Basil, but I hope that
they did.
Otherwise they might be ending up Numbers 50,001 and 50.002 in