How DNA changed the law industry
DNA testing is crucial to the law industry today. In law, this often refers to the process of determining an individual’s DNA characteristics before comparing it to the DNA discovered at a crime scene. This is a powerful tool in legal cases as it presents concrete evidence that an individual was at the crime scene. As a result, you can rule out potential suspects and close in on the perpetrator. But how exactly has DNA changed the law industry since its inception?
The emergence of DNA technology
Before DNA technology, it was much more difficult to find concrete evidence that a suspect was present at a crime scene. Indeed, law was a different place in the early 1980s: the technology lawyers you see today weren’t a thing back then. DNA technology emerged in the UK following the 1986 rape and murder of Dawn Ashworth. Genetics professor, Alec Jeffreys, was working at the University of Leicester at the time and had been working on paternity and immigration cases with his DNA pattern recognition technique. As a result, the police enlisted his help and tested DNA from over 4000 local men for a crime scene match. Eventually, they found a match with Colin Pitchfork, leading to the man’s arrest and murder conviction. Since then, DNA profiling has become one of the key weapons in forensic science and law.
Then and now
DNA testing has changed significantly since the 1980s though. Back then, Jeffreys used a type of repeat unit different from the ones used today. However, by the 1990s, the technology became more advanced – the forensics community switched to STRs, which are a shorter type of repeat unit. Meanwhile, today’s forensic scientists have streamlined the process of DNA testing to the point where it has become much more automated. This allows crime departments to get through tests much more efficiently.
The future of DNA testing
However, DNA technology is continually moving forward. One of the main advances on the horizon is that scientists are learning advanced DNA sequencing methods that can run many samples in parallel at a much faster rate. However, DNA sequencing is getting even more ambitious than this. Scientists are working on methods of using DNA information to establish key features in a suspect’s appearance. For instance, scientists hope to be able to use DNA sequencing to calculate eye colour, skin colour and hair type. However, an accurate means of achieving this is still in the future.
DNA testing has changed the law industry and it’ll continue to have a profound impact in the future. With continual developments being made, it’s hoped that evidence against suspects will soon become stronger than ever before.
