ForensicsForensic scientists recover fingerprints from foods
Forensic scientists at the University of Abertay Dundee have recovered latent fingerprints from foods — publishing the U.K.’s first academic paper on this subject. Only two other studies have ever reported successfully recovering fingerprints from foods, but the research for these took place in India and Slovenia using chemical substances that are not routinely used in Britain.
Researchers have developed a method to recover fingerprints from food // Source: cuny.edu
Forensic scientists at the University of Abertay Dundee have recovered latent fingerprints from foods — publishing the U.K.’s first academic paper on this subject.
Only two other studies have ever reported successfully recovering fingerprints from foods, but the research for these took place in India and Slovenia using chemical substances that are not routinely used in Britain. An Abertay University release reports that foods are notoriously difficult surfaces to recover prints from, so are often overlooked as items of evidence. By modifying an existing technique that was initially designed to recover fingerprints from the sticky side of adhesive tape, however, the team at Abertay has shown that this need no longer be the case.
The publication of their research – in the forensic science journal Science & Justice — means that others will now be able to replicate their results.
Dennis Gentles, a former crime scene examiner and forensic scientist who has worked at Abertay University for the past ten years, explains why this is so significant:
“Although there are proven techniques to recover fingerprints from many different surfaces these days, there are some surfaces that remain elusive, such as feathers, human skin, and animal skin.
“Foods such as fruits and vegetables used to be in that category, because their surfaces vary so much — not just in their color and texture, but in their porosity as well. These factors made recovering fingerprints problematic because some techniques, for example, work on porous surfaces while others only work on non-porous surfaces.
“Using the right technique is of the utmost importance because if you use the wrong one, it can damage the print and destroy what could have been a vital piece of evidence.
“The fact that we’ve managed to successfully recover prints from such difficult surfaces as foods is another step forward in the fight against crime. It may not seem like much, but a piece of fruit might just be the only surface that has been handled in a crime scene so developing a trusted and tested technique to recover fingerprints from such surfaces is something to be valued by crime scene examiners.”
Because of the differences between the substances available in the UK and those used in the other studies, the team at Abertay began by testing a selection of the techniques currently recommended by the Home Office for recovering fingerprints.
Disappointingly, their results showed that few of these techniques — when applied to foods including
