Forensic Science

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Melanie Phillips.

Today we're discussing forensic science, how everything from DNA fingerprinting to the trajectory of pollen has enhanced the human ability to comprehend the causes of death and map out the paths of killers.

And as usual, we're joined by an illustrious panel of curious people.

By which I should mean they are people people who are curious about things, not people who are, you know, anyway, well, they're both, actually, I've spoken to them beforehand.

So,

is that Robert Robinson?

No, Robert Robinson is this, and you should realise now that, of course, Sash is going to have a lot of difficulty managing to edit down the opening to the tight minute.

So.

Definition of forensic science.

As usual, we're joined by an illustrious panel of curious people, by which I mean people who are curious about things, not people who are in themselves curious or eccentric, though they are all of those things.

And they are.

My name is Dr.

Mark Spencer.

I'm from the Natural History Museum, and I'm a forensic botanist.

I'm Sue Black.

I'm an anatomist and a forensic anthropologist at the University of Dundee.

I am Rufus Hound, and I am available at short notice.

Just before, because this is your first time on the show, Rufus, though we have obviously done other gigs together, but people might think they know you as a song and dance man and as one of the great Shakespearean actors of the 21st century.

But

there's no one else who could you describe as a song and dance man and one of the great Shakespearean actors

and killed Top of the Pops.

Oh, yeah, you were actually the final presenter of Top of the Pops.

You were the undertaker of Top of the Pops, weren't you?

It feels weirdly on message for this evening's show.

I like to think of it not that I killed it, just that I was standing next to it when it died.

But your kind of performance career starts with being someone who was an explainer at the Science Museum.

Is that right?

So what's the point of the market?

That is correct, that is the official job title.

Well, Robin, I mean, I know you're a man of enormous intellect, but it involved explaining.

And what kind of things did you...

This is going to take a long time, by the way, because I'm going to drag this out now.

What kind of things did you explain, Rufus?

Well, Robin, I worked in the interactive galleries that were largely key stage appropriate for the twelves and under, and I was taught the science.

Oh no, sorry, sixteen and under, fifteen, sixteen into key stage four, but there was certainly enough to get your teeth into.

The overall gist being, Robin, that it was believed you could take somebody who was able to communicate with people and teach them science more readily than you could take a scientist and teach them how to communicate with people.

And thus my employee began.

Explain something.

The conservation of angular momentum is essentially the nearer you are to the middle of a turning thing, the easier it is for that thing to turn, therefore the faster it goes.

I.e., in the science museum, stick your bum out and hold on to this roundabout, and then I will push the roundabout.

When your bum is away from the middle of the circle, quite hard to move your weight all the way in that big circle.

So, lean up into it, you make a much smaller circle, much easier to turn, therefore, that energy has to go somewhere and you go faster.

And then I explain that now to my kids in playgrounds.

When they want to go fast, I'm like, what you need to know is the conservation of angular momentum.

And they go, shut up, push me.

Oh, you could just say it's a consequence of the isotropy of space by Innetha's theorem.

I'll tell you what, you should see his child's miserable face when he goes down the playground.

So we've got now onto the subject.

So Sue, can we just sort of actually basically be the definition of what exactly is forensic science?

Is it a science in itself?

There is no such thing as forensic science.

There is science.

And the forensic bit just simply means that you're taking that science into the courtroom.

So whether that science is mathematics or biology or chemistry or physics or whatever it may be, there is no actual thing that is forensic science.

And a lot of the things that have got lumped into forensic science have got no science at all.

Give me an example of something which you would consider should not be in the courtroom in terms of what is.

I am going to try forensic science that you are unhappy with, the idea that it should be named as something that can be as evidence-based to science.

For example, in a country in Europe, they have removed forensic handwriting.

And so forensic handwriting is something that now has considerable, questionable ability

to be involved in the courts.

Very few of us write anymore.

Most of us type now anyway.

And in terms of practising what our writing looks like, we're not very consistent with it.

And people are not very consistent at being able to identify it's written by the same person.

So things like forensic handwriting shouldn't do.

So it didn't get as far as kind of graphology, where they would go, Surely you can see the curve of the R is that of a murderer.

Well, indeed.

And that would be very helpful if you were doing a television programme, because there are several of those.

So there's a wonderful, wonderful image in one of these horrible American forensic programs where they have this amazing 3D box that reconstructs things in three dimensions.

And they found a murdered baby.

So they took the baby's skull and they reconstructed the baby's face and then they aged the baby.

And they walked out of the lab and bumped into the baby's mother, which looked exactly like the baby's face that they'd reconstructed.

So when we put that kind of nonsense out there, then you know, forensic science is not on a great footing, especially when you think that the people who watch CSI, I hope you don't, but the people who watch CSI are actually our jurors.

They're our triers of fact.

The people that decide whether you're going away for the rest of your life or not are the people who watch CSI.

So the issue there being that juries are sat there going, Well, we can't convict him.

I mean, they haven't done the groundwork.

They didn't even reconstruct the victim's face in their three D box.

Throw this out.

But it says, you know, what do you mean you can't get DNA in six months?

They can get it in 45 minutes on CSI.

God, you must be a really bad scientist.

Yeah.

They might be right.

Mark, I noticed in your biography, you had this wonderful line where it said, Your particular interest is 17th century and 18th century herbariums.

Yeah, that doesn't really relate to the forensics.

Does it mean you only get called in

for the deaths of people who own six?

If that would be interesting,

I'd love to go and exhume Carl Linnaeus and have a look at his bones in Uppsala Cathedral.

Unfortunately, I probably wouldn't be allowed.

But

no, I'm a relatively recent boy when it comes to forensics.

So you work at the Natural History Museum and, as you were saying, many different kinds of areas as well in terms of botany.

But when will you be called in in terms of looking into investigations?

What is it, what's your particular area which can enhance the city?

Several things.

First thing, not pollen.

You know, often again, going back to the CSI example, forensic botany is always about pollen.

You know, pollen grain proves that somebody was somewhere.

And actually, pollen, often as not, is not particularly helpful.

Pollen is, with most plant species, or many of them, is intrinsically highly mobile, particularly tree pollen because it's designed to blow around in the wind.

So, say you were in place X is quite risky under those scenarios.

That's not to say that pollen isn't useful, but we again that zeitgeist of, oh, you know, you can do it in 45 minutes, we'll use pollen, that solves the crime,

doesn't quite apply.

So, forensic botany for me is several different things.

First off, I often called to a scenario to ask police find a murder victim or a weapon or such like things.

So, police are generally very familiar with the built environment when they see serious crime, you know, people's households, factories, offices, but you take them into the wider landscape with all this weird green stuff that everybody ignores, and it's all a bit terrifying to them.

And they can't see structure, context, time, and space, which is potentially very helpful for understanding crime.

So, I'll often be used working with forensic anthropologists and archaeologists to locate burial sites, for example, by disturbance patterns, vegetation.

And when we are lucky enough to find somebody, actually look at the vegetation disturbance patterns, particularly things like my old friend the Bramble, to actually give some kind of assessment for potentially how long somebody's been there.

Usually, the kind of casework I do, the people have been often either on the ground or in the ground for months or years,

and the vegetation may well be one of the first clues to kind of help you assess who is that person, how long have they been there.

Oh, so you're looking for new growth?

And why is the bramble particularly?

Well, brambles are just one of my favourite plants.

You know, do you know what a person who studies brambles is called?

A brambologist?

A batologist.

A battologist.

A batologist, which is a delightful word.

It's from the Greek oblique for batus, berry.

And what why it doesn't seem to me to be a particularly wide or deep field, the study of brambles.

Indeed,

it catches a lot of the brain.

It's a specialist niche, it is fair to say, even for a botanist.

But brambles often tend to grow, along with stingy nettles, in places where people do bad things to other people.

And as a consequence, if for example...

Stinging nettles are everywhere.

I know, but particularly

in places where people do bad things.

You know, they won't often be in the middle of a field, but they'll be on the niche of a field where, for example, somebody would bury somebody, you know, if they want to hide a body.

So, brambles, bless them, you see them as these big, horrible, messy thickets.

I see them as very tidy, organized plants that actually produce a lovely rhythm of cycle of growth, which actually, once you get to understand it, can give you a bit of a sort of reverse chronology.

It's about a bit like looking at tree rings psychologically, but backwards in time from the outside.

So, I can actually give an estimate, or potentially can, of you know, if the brambles are over somebody's remains, they may well have been in the ground, say, from 2010 or something like that.

Also, if you look at a field, let's say, or a piece of woodland, you can see it almost in 4D.

You can see that you can see slices through time, the growth.

It's fair to say that I look at vegetation in quite a different way to most other people.

That's one of my favourite senses all seeing.

This is like the opposite of gardener's question time.

How do I get rid of nettles?

That's not the question.

The question is, what's buried underneath?

And certainly, actually, nettles, actually, it's the roots for me that I'm really interested in.

Like the bramble stems on top, the roots underneath the

stinging nettles are very tidy and organised, and they have growth cycles.

And again, if once you carefully excavate them, if they're over or interleaved through human remains, you can start to build up an understanding of potentially how long somebody's been there.

So both of these really common and often much maligned plants are often one of my key tools in when I'm working through a forensic environment.

What you're saying is that you're a hipster battologist because you only liked the brambles when they were underground.

Now, I'm most definitely not a batologist, though, because I have no patience for them in terms of identifying.

People who identify brambles are particularly fine-grained individuals who really, really, and I've got to be because I've got a lot of respect for some of them, but this is going to sound cheeky.

Do you know there are about 340 species of bramble in Britain?

But it takes a certain mindset to identify them.

So they're actually people whose entire life,

are Brambles.

Yep.

We're funny down at the Natural History Museum.

This has certainly taken a very different turn to how we imagined this show was going to be at three o'clock this afternoon.

So

don't say anything more about it.

The batologists are, like, in terms of people who complain to Radio 4, the Bramble lovers are pretty high up.

There's only about five or six of them in the UK, so there won't be a long list of complaints, but one of them is probably going to tell me off tomorrow.

It'd be really ironic, though, if he really got very angry and buried you out in the woodland.

Someone found him out because of the disturbance in the Brambles.

He won't find him, because he'll go, the one place I know not to marry him is under the Brambles.

Yeah, it's the burrow in the middle of the field.

They'll never look back.

Well, let's getting back to

the forensic science.

When do we see the kind of, when do we see this becoming part of

the

story in terms of in court cases?

When do we see forensic records beginning to be built up?

That's quite difficult.

I mean, the first time that science and the court, in terms of documentation, came together, was Galileo.

Because Galileo went to court and he stated in court, whilst he was being charged with heresy, that

in the laboratory you could understand the universal facts, and that didn't go down too well.

So there's never been a very easy, loving, warm, cuddly relationship between science and the law.

So, it's always been quite an adversarial place.

But if you look at what we consider to be the forensic sciences now, probably one of the earliest uses was the 13th century using fingerprints.

So, if you look back to some of the ancient Chinese pottery, then the potters would place their fingerprint within the clay and it identified it as being their pot.

So, we had an awareness that we could use parts of ourselves to identify who we may have been.

But there's a really big gap until we get to Bertillion in the sort of late, mid-to-late 1800s.

And he was a French policeman who decided that he could identify the criminal by the way they looked.

And so he was the chap who came up with the original of the mug shot.

So back in the 1800s, when we've got Sherlock Holmes coming onto the scene, it's suddenly become a really sexy subject.

Just like we have at CSI now, we had Sherlock Holmes and we had Bertignon, and it captured the public's imagination, and it still does.

So, when you're in a courtroom, you find that the jury, which is made up of the public, who are the triers of fact, usually find court cases incredibly boring.

They are so dull, and the only thing they've got to look forward to is the forensic scientist because it's a bit sexy.

And usually, then we end up being really dull as well.

Yeah,

such is the way.

So, really, that's the sort of history of it.

It's punctuated history in terms of forensic.

And typically in a

say a big murder case, would you tend to have several different forensic experts?

So the fingerprints, I suppose we should talk about DNA as well, those big areas, but also the forensics from the scene.

So it's multiple experts.

Very much so.

It depends what the scene is like and what the crime is like.

So the volume crime, for example, usually in relation to murders, will be DNA and fingerprints.

You're trying to identify who is the victim, but also who's the perpetrator.

But if you have an outdoor scene, then you will involve entomologists, you'll involve, I'm not going to say palynologists, I'm going to say forensic biology.

Palynology as well.

Yes.

You might involve.

And what's that?

Just pollen.

Palynology.

Palinology.

Palynology is pollen.

Entomology is bugs, palynology is pollen.

And soil science as well.

Soil science.

So often what you'll tend to do, as a person like myself, who's kind of, or we almost synthesize those disciplines to help provide a sort of understanding, particularly not necessarily for the evidential, but for understanding a crime, if, for example, it's a body search, we'll be looking at maybe mineralogy, possibly pollen, if it's the right scenario, vegetation fragment information, insects.

Insect fragments in soil can tell you something about the ecology of the environment and give you a go, oh, is it ancient woodland or is it grassland?

So long before we're looking for somebody.

So, all of those non-human environmental pieces of evidence can build an understanding of what, where, and how when it comes to a crime scene.

And so, you set a forensic strategy.

So, you meet around the table with all the scientists and ologists that you think you're ever going to need, and you weed out the ones, no pun intended, you weed out the ones that you don't need,

and you decide which ones you want and which ones are going to go into the crime scene, because the last thing you want are 25 pairs of feet tramping all over a crime scene.

So the forensic strategy will determine what is important, where you're going, who you need.

And you may well find that different experts will come in at different points in the investigation.

You were saying about what there is a time when pollen may be used.

What would be an example of pollen being useful?

Well, Well, as I say, certain types of pollen are highly mobile, like tree or grass pollen, but there are other types of pollen which are highly immobile.

I had a nice case several years ago where actually,

and this didn't actually ultimately go to court for various reasons, so I'll be a little bit careful about what I say, but in amongst the broader cohort of highly mobile pollen types, there were also some actually quite rare pollen types, including a rather obscure fern,

which for this particular part of England was a scarce plant.

And we initially had a search scenario of two counties.

And tree pollen's not brilliant on two counties, but in there there were two or three little pollen grains, sorry, spore things, excuse me, ferns, naughty palynology gets ferns in there because they don't truly have pollen but similar structures.

And they were, so being a bit pedantic, being a botanist.

And from two sort of counties, we were able to say, you know, there are two or three sort of of 10-kilometre squares, which still quite a large area to search where this plant is known to occur, which helps focus the search.

So the pollen can help you kind of localize the search.

You know, I think we should test you both.

So

I want to ask Rufus.

Rufus,

if you invent the perfect crime for us, and then let's test.

Let me see what mistakes you would have made.

Okay.

So what you're saying is, imagine a world in which I had planned what I believe to be the perfect murder.

Yes, and this is a moment where I reveal that on national radio.

Yeah, um, well, I mean, I suppose I don't watch a great deal of that CSI stuff or um

Dexter, but I have watched some of it.

And so I always thought that the idea was basically that everything you do, you work backwards from and destroy.

So you start with the body, that goes straight into a wood chipper.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Why is that a mistake?

Oh, because you make a wonderful mess.

You spread the body into as many pieces as possible.

You've got DNA everywhere, you've got blood everywhere, you've got bone fragments everywhere.

Don't go for the wood chipper.

But what about his, in terms of what's left from him shoving the person into the wood chipper, in terms of the evidence of Rufus?

Because he's probably bought the wood chipper under another name.

So, you know, that's what I'm saying.

I'm with you on this one.

This is so.

We're not going to win.

Oh, we will.

We will.

Don't give up.

Okay, well, when he pushed the body into the wood chipper because it was on farmland, he was wearing his boots.

He left his footprint in the footprint, was the soil that he took from his own garden and carried all the pollen and all the necessary spores with him.

So we've got his bread.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

This is the thing we work backwards.

So the body goes into the wood chipper.

Next, everything I'm wearing into the wood chipper.

You're going to get arrested for something entirely different.

Not for the first time.

Then you put on one of those decorators' suits, right?

Those sort of thin paper things and

slippers, you know, cheap like Converse or whatever.

And climb into the wood chipper.

That are, you know, cheaply bought and available everywhere and easily disposed of.

And then you set fire to the wood chipper and everything everything that went through the wood chipper.

Then you get in the car, you take off the things that you were wearing in the car with the hood and all of that, you set fire to those in the car and the car.

Then you swim through a river

upstream to where you yourself were originally spawned and you spawn again.

Oh no, that's something else.

That was a really delightful mixture of Colombo and the water babies.

Very interesting mix.

Well, the river thing's interesting.

So, again,

once you get off land, once you're in water, how much does that change in terms of how you can investigate?

Where you've got the flow of something and in terms of when the body is discovered.

Well, actually, water can reveal all sorts of exciting things.

A, there's the DNA.

So, if, for example, Rufus has, whilst you've been flowing upstream, you'd had a quick wee, we would have picked it up.

And as we know, most men, when they get in water, you know, a swimming pool, river, or whatever, they can't help but wee themselves every now and then.

So, we'd have got you that way.

But the other thing is potentially in that process of swimming for water, if you'd have not probably washed your hair or you'd kept your pants on because you were a bit shy,

we'd have picked up diatoms.

Now, diatoms are wonderful organisms, they're primarily unicellular algal organisms, and they are highly indicative of different types of water type body.

So we can use those, actually, they're quite often used in drownings for characterizing water body types and also seasonality, depending on what the scenario is.

So we'd have got you.

Right, that leaves us with space.

So, in terms of finding the remnants of that, so the flow of the stream, etc., the flow in the river, you know, the bigger the river, is that you still, you're going to be there and

well, I won't personally, because I don't do diatoms, but one of my colleagues is a leader.

Well, you trip in the other brownie.

He's brilliant on diatoms, so he does a lot of work with drowning.

So, one of the tragic things, you know, when somebody's drowning is the last moments, they and I'm not an expert in this bit, you breathe in very intensely, and the pressure of that pulls water through the membranes into your lungs.

And one of the things that happens whilst happening is the diatoms which are in the water get pulled through your membranes into your bloodstream and they lodge in your organs.

And quite often, what we can do is take some organ tissue from the deceased and we can what we could refer to as ash it.

So, we burn it, and diatoms are actually their outer case made of silica, so it's really tough.

Put the remains that's left over from the ashing process under a microscope, and we can identify the diatoms and use that to potentially identify salt water, freshwater, et cetera.

But also help to build a potential understanding of whether the person may or may not have drowned or whether they were craftily placed there by another person pretending that they drowned.

Do you realize I just risked one?

This is the first episode out of 12 series where we might have actually saved someone's life.

Because at this point, someone's listening, going, I'm just about to go and kill my husband.

Oh,

oh, that's not going to work out, then, is it?

So, thank you all for your help.

So,

we often hear about DNA evidence, and it's often thought to be, I suppose,

the ultimate piece of evidence.

You can't escape the DNA, it convicts people.

So, could you talk through the problems and advantages of DNA evidence?

DNA is, I mean, it's really relatively recent, our use of DNA in the forensic scenario.

Alec Jeffries was 1984.

You know, Pre-84 was pre-DNA days in terms of forensic science.

So it's relatively young and its rapid increase has been truly incredible.

So from 84, by the time we were into 1985, we were using DNA in forensic cases.

And we've got to a point now where we believe it because it's DNA.

So it's almost that case of going into court and says, if it's DNA, it must be true.

The trouble with DNA, and there are many problems with DNA, is if you're using it to identify somebody, you have to have something to match it with.

So if you're not on the DNA database, if we don't have a clue as to who you are, just because we can extract the DNA from the deceased remains, you know, it doesn't have a name and an address sewn into somewhere on the double helix, it's just not there.

So it's as much use as a chocolate watch if you've got nothing to compare it with.

We might be able to give some sort of clues in terms of ethnic origin and such things, but they're very broad.

So if you're using them for identification, there are problems.

The other thing is that it's really where almost all of the investment in forensic science has gone since the 1990s.

So, many of the other sciences associated with forensic science are Cinderella sciences because DNA has proven to be so powerful and so useful in a forensic scenario.

But in many ways, now we've almost got a little bit too clever.

So, you can, for example, laser out a single cell, you can take that single cell, you can replicate that DNA.

You don't need more than one cell.

Our problem is, like pollen, DNA is something that's transferable, so that my DNA is now on your shirt.

So when you go home and murder someone tonight, my DNA is at the crime scene.

So we have problems in understanding contamination, we have problems in understanding the transfer of DNA, and we also have problems when we have multiple profiles of getting the courts to understand what the statistics are behind those.

Because courts and juries generally don't like statistics, so that they glaze over the minute you start to even mention a mean or a standard deviation.

And much of DNA is about statistics.

So, typically, on the average person, how many other people's DNA do they carry around with them?

I've no idea, but what is interesting is that whether you're a DNA shedder or not, so some people shed DNA better than others.

So, if you're a good shedder, then we've got a better chance of getting some DNA if you commit the crime.

By shedder, you mean so it's skin cells we're talking about.

So some people shed skin better than others.

So you're a better provider of DNA than others.

So we all carry around with us.

We're all carrying everyone's DNA.

Many.

In that regard.

That does give head and shoulders a new angle for the next ad campaign, doesn't it?

Are you likely to murder someone?

So this is...

Murder feather.

Don't be a shedder.

Well, in a broader case, you say that it's this is we're talking about increasingly complex evidence, that the science is increasingly detailed and complex, so it's increasingly difficult for juries and indeed lawyers and judges to understand perhaps.

So is it now more common that cases break down just because the evidence is too complex, it's too detailed, it can't be explained to the court?

And does the judge get a sense that people are not understanding this evidence?

The courts definitely get an understanding that the public think they have more scientific understanding in terms of forensic science than they actually do.

The Lord Chief Justice gave the Kalisher lecture here in London last year, and within that, he said, We have a real problem.

We have a real problem that the scientists are not agreeing, that the judge and probably all the barristers don't quite understand the science either.

And if you think about the law as being the intermediary between the scientist and the public, because the public are the triers of fact, then we have a real communication breakdown in science.

It's a real problem within our courtrooms.

We ran a public engagement programme in Dundee very recently with the Dundee Science Centre and we had a pretend murder.

I know it's Dundee, but we had a pretend murder.

And we brought in communities from hard to reach areas and they became the crime scene and investigators, so they had to go and they had to work the crime scene, they had to try and figure out what the DNA said and what the fingerprints said.

And we had the most marvellous quote from somebody who had been involved in a serious case, whether it was either a rape or a murder, and they were a juror.

And in Scotland we have a third verdict, which is not proven, And they had said they came back with the verdict of not proven on this individual.

But they hadn't understood the science, and they said they had a much better understanding of the science now than they had when they were on the jury.

And if they'd had that information then, they might have come back with a different result, which is a bit worrying.

A pretend murder in Dundee, though.

I'm quite excited by that idea.

Who was the victim?

A Mr.

W.

Softy?

Hmm.

I'm the only one that knows that the Beanos made him Dundee.

Clearly.

Because, see, obviously, following on from that was the idea, comedically at least, who would have murdered Walter the Softie.

I was then going to go in to say, all we've been able to find are these strands of red and black jumper and the wiry hair of a small dog.

And we would all have laughed.

Tell you what, Rufus, why don't we do the whole...

Now you've given them the information, let's see how it works a second time.

Are you suggesting that now they've got more information they may reach a different verdict?

But in terms of going to the about public perception now and in terms of the fictional versions of the world you're involved in, what are the advantages to an increasing number of people at least knowing of this area of kind of expertise, this area in terms of investigation, or is more of it negative?

I think where it has a benefit is that if it interests children in school in science, if it gets them into science, because

based on all of us,

there's the investigation, there's the, you know, we want to be the one that solves the mystery.

If you can make science palatable to children that you wouldn't normally reach in traditional sciences, then I think that has a big benefit.

But I really worry when we interview students and they go,

I need to know stats.

No, no, you've got a gun

strapped to your thigh.

Isn't that what you do and you press a button and the machine tells you what the answer is?

So there's often an unrealistic expectation.

So I think we've got a lot of work to do

within the schools for education.

But I think forensic science has a great hook that gets the interest and they can see the direct applicability of what the science is doing.

I mean, certainly, I think when schools and education in general, yeah, botany is one of the oldest scientific disciplines in the world, yet it is one of the most at-risk scientific disciplines.

You know, we have virtually no educational environment where children and young people could get direct access to the natural world, fiddle around with plants in ditches, look at shales, whatever it might be.

And that has had a serious knock-on effect.

In actually, most university courses now, increasingly, are applied biological sciences.

There's virtually no whole organism biology.

So, there are significant impacts and issues for us in our society.

This seems unfortunate and strange because if you think about astronomy is one of the subjects you can do with nothing apart from your environment, you walk outside and look up, but botany is another one, isn't it?

To just go and take a delight in the plants at the bottom of your garden.

Plants are the most ever-present thing generally in the natural world that people, apart from the rock underneath us, and we've distanced ourselves psychologically from them.

We see them on a daily basis, but we disregard them.

And that has implications for everything in our life, including forensics.

You know, we've tended to ignore botany in the forensic environment.

And I have been to sort of meetings in Whitehall where

they look at you like I'm a voodoo practitioner.

You're like, what?

And it is all about those kind of big straplined CSI DNA kind of

bit of technology.

But the primary thing, humans coming into contact with the natural world and that material moving around with the person, either the victim or the criminal,

we've completely forgotten about pretty much.

Now, the great

question in botany, probably the greatest ever.

You sounded quite like you were doing one of your tele shows there.

It was pretty much one of the great questions.

The greatest question much debated on the Infinite Monkey Cage is the question of the nature of strawberries.

Indeed.

I am well versed in this deep and profound question.

Death.

And I believe for the first time in the monkey cage, you're going to give us a definitive answer, and you've brought a prop.

I have brought a dead strawberry.

It is a very old dead strawberry as well.

Unfortunately, you all can't see it back there.

Or indeed on the radio.

Which is a very good point.

So you'll have to be descriptive, but this is

a wonderful book you have there.

So,

in the 80-odd million objects we have at the Natural History Museum, we have some fabulous old things, and this is one of my favourite things.

This is part of the herbarium, the Pless plant collection, of a gentleman called Joseph Andrews, who was an apothecary from Sudbury in Suffolk.

And he was collecting plants in the mid-18th century.

And before me, I have a lovely, squashed, dead strawberry that he collected on May the 24th, if my eyes write, 1744.

So, it's probably the oldest dead strawberry in Britain.

Now, now

doesn't necessarily believe in the death of a strawberry.

So let's have a look.

Can we just quickly show the audience to see whether they believe?

We can do a kind of brucey bit here, alive or dead.

Let's just point to the strawberry and the potential of that as jam.

It is very.

It is quite crusty.

It's probably also covered in mercuric chloride, so it probably wouldn't be very tasty.

How do we know it is dead?

This is the.

We really need to get to this.

How is that dead?

It's probably fair to say that if you were going to go back to our old friend's DNA, if you were to extract the DNA from this, it's probably quite degraded and not very functional.

But it's RNA and other bits are not too good either.

It's mitochondria and it's probably not functioning either.

So evidentially, it's probably pretty clearly dead, I'm afraid.

See, this is the kind of thing where if you put a skeleton opposite Brian, you still go, there might still be the potential of life though.

So you couldn't do a kind of a Jurassic Park-type.

I'll tell you, the main reason around it is I'm not sure everyone will be that excited by going, these strawberries are from hundreds of years ago.

I'm terrified.

Look at the size of the raspberries.

Keep away from the brambles.

So, I couldn't build a great theme park on an island somewhere

using that strawberry.

I would love you, Tev.

I would love you, Tev.

Are you in with?

I want to do that, Rush.

I've just got the the low-grade version of Jurassic Park, which is people and strawberries.

Just dunno.

But you see,

so

I want a definition of death.

Well, mitochondrial and mitochondria are not functioning, you know, they are the powerhouses of the energy of all living organisms, and non-functioning mitochondria is probably pretty indicative, really.

So, in all seeds that

have the potential to germinate, the mitochondria are still functioning.

They are being

sort of resting mode.

Now, I'm not a plant physiologist, I'm a shockingly bad physiologist.

In fact, as a botanist, I did a very naughty thing.

I managed to avoid doing photosynthesis throughout the whole of my degree

because I am really rubbish.

So, but you know, we do have seeds in the Natural History Museum collection which have been sat there for hundreds of years.

Cue gardens have done the same thing, and they're in stasis, they're not dead, and you can revive them.

But I think the chances of this strawberry being revived are quite remote.

But not a zero.

I'll grant you that.

Maybe.

I think it's probably not going to be a Jurassic part, more of a kind of walking dead scenario.

We mentioned, because we mentioned clothed pigs at the beginning of the show, it seems a pity not to go there at some point.

And

classic radio thought.

Hold

This is one of the things.

We've talked a lot about the environment around

a death, but actually talking about how we know.

I mean, for instance, in America, they have at least one body farm where actual human bodies are used, placed in different scenarios to find out about decomposition, etc.

In terms of the UK, how do we find out?

How did that start with the pigs?

What?

Did that follow?

In a minute, we're going to have a big pig reveal.

Don't ruin the pig.

pig.

And then you went to body farms from pig dressing pigs.

Yeah, well, they use human bodies in America.

Hmm.

But what do they use in this country?

Hard-boiled eggs and nuts and soap.

So anyway, are pigs ever used in a similar sense?

Now,

let me think.

Who knows?

This is like being on stage with Siegfried and Roy,

Suddenly the originals.

Suddenly I can see the mirrors.

Yes, so body farms in America do leave dead bodies out to see how they decompose in different scenarios.

The trouble is that the research that comes out of the body farms are very specific to the locale in which this occurs.

So they have a very specific botanical profile, they have a very specific fauna and flora profile.

So that what you learn from a body decomposing in Texas is going to be very different to what you learn from a body decomposing in North Carolina or in New York or in wherever it is.

So they become very, very area-specific.

We don't have them in the UK, but we do have facilities.

There are a couple of them in the UK where we bury pigs as a proxy for the human.

And they are roughly of the same size as some humans, roughly of the same fat content as some humans, probably had a better diet than most humans.

And we choose to dress them up sometimes, yes.

Not personally.

But I was told that it's not just scenarios like that.

I mean, they are placed in lots of different potentials.

Like the idea, when I was first told, this might be wrong, but I was told that, for instance, pigs will be, you know, dressed up, they'll be put in clothes.

Basically, it sounded to me like a Beatrix Potter version of Hostel 2.

So, in terms of they're placed in cars, all of the other things that.

that we have them on roofs in places in central London which I cannot reveal

so we have a programme at the Natural History Museum where we do indeed

put pigs out and wait for the local fly community to lay their eggs on them because flies in particular a lovely thing named Califora vomitoria

is wonderful for calibrating not actually time of death but the interval from where the point the person's been put in the landscape or ended up there to the point where the fly pupae or the adults are collected.

And so, if you understand the environmental regime, the temperature, etc., you can basically dissect maggots and look at their developmental processes and how far they've gone along the process to becoming an adult and put estimates of time for how long they've been feeding.

And so, things like the dressing up, that's again part of that will change the way decomposition works.

Well, different environments, yes, creating a different environment?

Yeah, things like you know, how does a suitcase impact?

You know, there's ideas that you know, for example, if you put somebody into a suitcase, you know, then flies won't get there.

That's not true.

They're incredible.

My colleague's got this amazing film, which he loves,

of um

a magg uh a fly um sticking her ovipositor through the little cracks in a zip and getting between and laying her eggs so that the maggots can get through.

So they're ingenious organisms and they will get their dinner.

He did it.

Whoever the bloke with that film is, he did it.

If I was watching this on telly and the question is, who did it?

And there's a bloke with a video of flies

laying their eggs through the zipper bus, he did it.

Next.

So you're somewhere in London, you've got a pig in a suitcase.

You must have said you'd have flown over it on your helicopter, wouldn't you?

Not me personally, personally, but

there are pigs somewhere in London, probably in suitcases, dressed up in whatever,

providing wonderful scientific data.

So, Sue, the final I wanted to ask you, you were saying at the beginning, you know, the idea of all of the different things that come together to make what might be considered forensic science, still there's a lot of it which is not really science.

What is going to be the next step where, or what are you looking towards thinking this will now

create a far more scientific evidential background for these kind of investigations.

I think we've actually got to step back, and I think we've got to go back to our Cinderella sciences that haven't been funded for the last 30 years and bring them up to scratch.

So it's not very sexy because what we want to do is we want to build flashy machines with lots of noises.

At the end of the day, what we really need is some good science.

We need to stop doing forensic and we need to go back to doing science.

And there's a big gulf between the two of them.

It's a pity that's not sexy because the rest of the show was so very sexy, wasn't it?

I think all of those flies laying the eggs in the pigs in the suitcase really had people going at home.

So, this is on at 4:30, isn't it?

It's when people are having the tea.

It's when people used to have their tea.

So, does it help that my speciality is dismemberment?

Does that make it sexy?

See, that's what we should.

And your speciality is my specialty, it's dismemberment.

Well, your questions start now.

We decided to.

How can that be a speciality?

So if you find an arm, they bring you in and say, was this person dismembered?

In my expert opinion.

So what you can do, depending on the bits that you find, so it's a really bad idea to dismember a body.

Because if you dismember a body into 18 different parts, you've got 18 deposition sites.

So you've got 18 chances of being caught.

Really bad idea.

Do it across a police force boundary because then they don't talk to each other.

But if you've got the dismembered body, what we can do is we can tell you what type of implement was used.

So, was it a blade?

Was it a saw?

Was it a handheld saw, reciprocating saw, a parasaw?

Didn't see the brain.

Was the body?

Propeller?

Circular saw?

Was the body lying face down?

Was it lying on its back when the limbs were taken off, when the head was taken off?

All of these things matter.

Or was it dismembered by something instead of a human?

It might not have been human.

Foxes, for example, are very significant parts of the dismemberment process in the wider landscape.

So they will often, whilst investigating, pick up

a forearm or a lower limb and take that with them to their dens.

So one of the things we will often do is have to investigate where all of the parts of the person is,

which is really quite a challenging experience.

The equivalent of that is the home pet.

So if you are locked in your house and you die, then your dog and your cat need to eat.

And so dogs will go for different parts of a body than cats.

If you've been affected by anything you've heard on this show,

I'm not surprised.

It's not the normal upbeat ending we have to the series.

This is a genuinely wreathian bit of radio there.

If you're going to dismember someone then spread the parts across the boundaries of different police forces and the chances of you getting caught are lower.

That's wreathian.

So, if you've used any of our ideas in our summer break, send in your photos.

So, we asked the audience what their idea for the perfect murder is.

Obviously, that would have changed in the previous 27 minutes.

And here are some of the answers we had.

Danny Dyer's use of the English language.

10 bonus radio 4 points to whoever did that.

That was John.

This is correct from a relativistic standpoint.

It says, push them into a black hole so I can watch forever, but at least it's quick for them.

It's correct.

It shows a deep understanding of relativity.

That's Colin.

Well done, Colin.

Colin's won a date with Brian Cox.

Being smothered by Brian Cox's hair, followed by him murdering a tune, and then a galaxy.

Professor Brian Cox at the LHC with a toblarone.

Freudian.

Trapping someone in a very echoe room with Brian Bless it.

And anyway, so finally, can I just say thank you very much to our panel.

Professor Sue Black, Dr.

Mark Spanzer, and Rufus Hound.

Also, very excitingly, for the first time in the show, we could do, if you are as old as me, you'll remember that sometimes at the end of Play for Today, they'd go, and Richard Todd can currently be seen at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Theatre, Guildford.

Well, and Rufus Hound can currently be seen in the War of the Roses, the William Shakespeare trilogy at the Rose Theatre, Kingston.

And Professor Brian Cox can currently be seen moving very slowly towards you in your dreams, his hair billowing outwards like a small subatomic particle filled with potential love.

So.

But that's all we're here for.

How can you fill a subatomic particle with anything?

Because they're point-like objects.

That is so.

How typical of physicists to destroy the love.

So

it's a Euclidean point.

Sorry.

It's not whether Euclid or Euclid's that you try.

It's a very famous Rutherford insult.

Actually, Eric Rutherford was great at slinging insults around.

And there was some self-important local government official or something.

And he called him a Euclidean point because he had position but no magnitude.

Thank you very much.

Goodbye.

Thanks for Tom.

In the infinite monkey cage.

In the infinite monkey cage.

In the infinite monkey cage.

now, nice again.

Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously.

Each week, I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past.

In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed-from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg Brothers.

Listen to You're Dead to Me Now, wherever you get your podcasts.