Forensics, DNA Fingerprinting and Human
Origins
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This week we take a foray into forensics, as Detective Inspector Alan Cook from Essex Police joins us to talk about how DNA is used to solve crimes, Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys from Leicester University helps us brush up on how DNA fingerprinting works, Dr Tamsin O'Connell from the University of Cambridge describes how archaeologists extract DNA from old bones and how DNA can help us track down our human origins, and in Kitchen Science we have the first ever radio DNA fingerprinting race, in which schools will battle it out to find out which of the Naked Scientists is the foul footed felon with the criminally smelly feet...
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We have a picture of my wife's father in the police force in 1947. He's wearing a hat and holding a truncheon, which we now have in our possession and have been kept safely in a box. Would it be possible to extract DNA from the truncheon to...
How can someone extract and sequence DNA from something that's been buried for centuries?
When you have DNA left on a piece of clothing, how do modern techniques match the DNA with the guilty suspect?
Matthew has emailed us with an addition to an answer last week.
I've heard that there's a single origin for the emergence of Homo sapiens. Is there any scientific background to this claim?
What is the possibility of erroneous matching of DNA? There was a case I saw about 8 years ago in which a man was convicted. When the evidence was re-examined at a later date, the bars of the DNA fingerprint did not match. What's the probab...
I've heard that bone marrow transplants can cause havoc with DNA testing. Is this the case, and if so, how can the problem be resolved?
Is there any such thing that could erase or change DNA?
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