Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Guilty by a handshake / Herald, 2 May 2006

http://digbig.com/4hkcy
"Many more innocent people could become suspects for murders, rapes and other serious crimes because of the new highly sensitive DNA profiling techniques employed by British police, according to Professor Allan Jamieson, director of the Forensic Institute, Edinburgh, and the former head of Lothian and Borders Police forensic science lab.Jamieson believes that "low copy number" (LCN) DNA analysis is vulnerable to contamination and could lead to "another Shirley McKie".Britain is the only country in the world where police forensic scientists employ the highly sensitive LCN technique. It allows crime scene investigators to detect invisible amounts of DNA from a surface which a suspect has brushed against or merely breathed on."