Ask the Scholars

Like some of the other questions, especially the one on bone marrow, we have to look at the assumption that is embedded in the question, which is the idea that forensic investigators actually are good at telling an individual's race from their bones or from a fragment of their DNA. I can very clearly say that this assumption is incorrect.

Initially, there were a number of forensic studies in which they tried to separate individuals into different so-called races depending on what...

Let me illustrate Alan's point. There was a story in the New York Times recently about a mass murderer in Louisiana. The police were relying on a profile that mass murderers tend to be white, and they were having trouble locating a suspect. A geneticist, Mark Shriver at Penn State, got a DNA sample and said that the ancestry of this person was more likely black. They then apprehended a black person. The fact of the matter is, all that genetics allows you to do is to make a better than ra...

The DNA research sounds a lot like the development of the forensic bone work. Looking at a lot of variables at the same time and saying that the combination of looking at lots of variables can properly sort individuals into different groups.

With Mark Shriver's work, he frequently compares blacks from Washington, D.C. with whites from Penn State University. And he has found some alleles that do a pretty good job of sorting those two groups of individuals. However, in Louisiana th...

Can I add one thing to that also? At one time, most, if not all of this work was being done in universities by researchers who had no other interest than the advancement of knowledge and what other baggage and intellectual prejudice that they brought to the table. But the fact is that, today, a lot of this work is being done by companies who have a vested interest in the profitability and marketing service that people will buy. And in this particular case, we're talking about a company c...