Forensic scientists recover fingerprints from foods
apples, tomatoes, onions and potatoes — produced a print of high enough quality for it to be presented as evidence in court.
When they modified a substance known as Powder Suspension (PS) — a thick, tar-like substance – they found, however, that it produced a clear, high-quality mark on the smooth-surfaced food items such as the onions, apples and tomatoes.
Dennis Gentles continues:
“There are about 15 techniques that are currently recommended by the Home Office for recovering prints — from a variety of surfaces — and research teams are constantly refining them and developing new ones so that the police can get as much evidence of as high a quality as possible to help with an investigation.
“Although Powder Suspension was initially developed to recover prints from the sticky side of adhesive tape, it’s since been found to work on other surfaces, so we wondered whether it would work on foods, as this was something it hadn’t been tested on before.
“The smooth surface of an apple is very different from that of sticky tape though, so such a thick substance wasn’t going to produce the same results on such a different surface. So we tried altering the formulation a bit, making it more dilute than that suggested by the Home Office, and found that it out-performed all the other methods we tested.
“Although there’s still a considerable amount of research to do before we can recommend techniques for all types of foods, we’ve shown for the first time that it really is possible to recover fingerprints from them — something that was previously thought to be unachievable. This means the police will now be able to gather even more evidence to present in court, adding more weight to their investigations.”
The release notes that forensic scientists at Abertay University have made a number of forensics breakthroughs in recent years, notably recovering latent (or invisible) fingerprints from fabrics for the very first time in 2011.
The university is currently offering an artist-in-residency opportunity within its forensic science department, as part of the inaugural Print Festival Scotland which will run alongside the renowned Impact 8 International Printmaking Conference in Dundee this September. Further information about the residency and the two events can be found here and here.
— Readmore in Sarah Ferguson et al., “A preliminary investigation into the acquisition of fingerprints on food,” Science & Justice 53, no. 1 (March 2013): 67–72 (doi: org/10.1016/j.scijus.2012.08.001)
