Massively Parallel Sequencing has revolutionized laboratories' ability to harness more and more information from our genetics. This has led to massive improvements in medical diagnostics, public health (think SARs-CoV-2 variant identification), ancestry determinations, and now forensic science has begun adapting this technology to criminal investigations.

Epigenetics: The clothes of your DNA. While the DNA sequence contains the instructions, your epigenome controls which part of the instructions are read and used. But how do we use this in forensic science?

Forensic Scientists under pressure: innovation, productivity, and legal and ethical boundaries. Learning Ethics as Lived Practice to ensure ethical evolution of forensic genetics. In this episode I spoke with Professors Dr. Matthias Weinroth and Dr. Carol McCartney, two of the authors of "Ethics as Lived Practice. Anticipatory Capacity and Ethical Decision-Making in Forensic Genetics". It's a fascinating discussion about forensic genetics and the rapidly evolving technologies from the perspective of a social scientist and law professor.

DNA as the "Biological Witness". Forensic DNA Phenotyping predicts the externally visible characteristics - i.e. what a person may look like - from their biological material.

Consent, DNA databases, and misuse of San Francisco rape victim’s DNA.

This episode is the first in a series (non-sequential) providing overviews of different fields of forensic science.

This episode follows on from episode 2’s focus on independent reviews with a conversation with David Schudel, PhD. As an expert in multiple fields of forensics science- forensic chemistry, fire analysis, cell site analysis….and seemingly the goto guy for all the weird cases, he has an interesting vantage point for a forensic scientist.

What happens when the crime laboratory gets it wrong? In this episode we discuss the issues with relying solely on laboratory accreditation to determine if a forensic science laboratory is doing the testing correctly, what happens when a lab fails as it did in Washington, D.C., and how other laboratories manage to recover and regain customer confidence. We explore how organizations like the Texas Forensic Science Commission work to ensure quality forensic science work by taking action and the better way for laboratories to respond and improve after a complaint.