52 Australian Geographic
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: FAIRFAX; SIMON ALEKNA/FAIRFAX; NEWSPIX; AAP; FAIRFAX; DAVID HANCOCK; NEWS LTD / NEWSPIXLocally, the new FASS lab is also helping police to
identify old, unidentified human remains, kept in a
so-called bone room in Sydney, and return them to
their families. Also, previously unusable evidence, such
as shed strands of hair, which don’t contain a cell
nucleus or normal DNA, can now be processed.
Professor Chris Lennard, a forensic scientist from
the University of Western Sydney, which houses the
Crime Scene Investigation Training and Research
Facility for NSW police forensics’ teams, as well as
students, believes that we’re now about to enter an
entirely new world of evidence.
“The next breakthrough, which is still largely in
the research phase, will be next-generation DNA
profiling methods,” Chris says. “So when a...sample
doesn’t match a suspect, or someone on the database,
forensic biologists will be able to provide some
physical characteristics of the person to go on.
“While DNA profiling systems already exist that
can provide information such as likely hair colour, eye
colour and ethnic background, future systems will
provide information such as facial features,” he adds.
“There are labs around the world developing systems
that will even give a molecular photo fit of the indi-
vidual who left DNA trace at the crime scene.”
What’s more, in the distant future, criminals could
be tracked down by their bacteria alone. A paper
published in the journal Science in 2014 revealed that
each of us leaves our own unique microbial ‘aura’
behind after spending less than a day somewhere,
and these could one day be analysed and monitored
to give police clues about who’s been at a crime scene.“If you combine the future possibilities in chemi-
cal profiling of fingermarks and DNA profiling, you
could come up with a reasonably good description of
an offender, their habits and recent activities without
them being on any of the databases,” Chris adds.W
ITH THESE tools being rolled out in the
next 5–10 years, the challenge now lies
in what should be done with this infor-
mation, and how to use it to identify crime patterns,
says Professor Claude Roux. As the director of the
Centre for Forensic Science at the University of
Technology, Sydney, he works with Chris and Sharon,
as well as the NSW Police Force, the federal police,
and other law enforcement agencies.
“The three basics of forensic science are: trace
recognition and field collection; analysis; and sharing
the information with end users, whether they are
investigators, intelligence analysts or policymakers,”
Claude says. “The challenge comes before and after
that: working out which surfaces to swab to find invis-
ible DNA, which trace evidence to look for and where,
and then working out what those results mean.”
“Solving a crime is still about so much more than
the ‘who’,” he adds. “This intelligence might help us
understand the ‘why’ or the ‘how’.” Despite all of the
new technology, Claude believes that forensic science
is still very much the same mind game that’s
portrayed in fictional tales of Sherlock Holmes.
“At the end of the day, forensics is simply the study
of traces left behind at a crime scene. It’s about using
science and logical rules to make sense of observa-
tions,” he explains. “Just like archaeologists study
artefacts, we study these traces, these remnants
of people’s presence and activity, to work out what
happened in the past.” AG“The next break-
through...will be
next-generation
DNA profiling
methods.”
Fine details. A technician fills the liquid nitrogen container of
a scanning electron microscope, which can reveal details less
than 1 micron (one-millionth of a metre) in size.