MY DAY AS A PATHOLOGIST
ONCE upon a time TV detectives could rely on nothing more than ingenuity and occasionally their willingness to bend the rules. The likes of Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot thrived on outwitting a criminal. Now though shows such as Silent Witness, CSI and Bones, series 12 of which is shortly to be released on DVD, have put forensic science front and centre. When we see pathologists getting stuck in, who wouldn’t want to give it a go themselves?
Well I got the chance to do it for a day alongside Prof Carolyn Rando, of University College, London, an expert on examining skeletal remains. The walls of the “bone lab” where she is teaching me about her trade are lined with animal skeletons and trays of bones ready for use in experiments.
For now though we’re interested in the cardboard box Prof Rando has just placed on the laboratory table. In it is a real human skeleton, albeit a very old one. The stringent conditions on the use of fresh human remains by researchers means she can only show me “archaeological” remains.
My job is to, er, put it together and see what I can discover. The bones are a streaky reddish colour and feel like soft rock. This is by virtue of the length of time they have spent in the ground. The fresh animal bones I am allowed to examine are white and feel waxy to the touch. I am told this is what fresh human ones feel like too.
Putting the skeleton together is relatively straightforward. The larger bones are recognisable and many of the smaller ones have gone missing. With the help of anatomical models (and some expert advice) I managed to arrange them into something recognisably skeletal.
Interpreting the secrets of this silent witness was much trickier. Prof Rando says: “The skeleton can show us their age, their sex, their stature. Then we can look for evidence of trauma, disease, what their occupation may have been or what they were doing when they died, as well as any unique physical features.”
For me, merely working out if it’s a man or a woman ranks as challenge enough. Measuring the hip joint (women have much smaller ones) and examining the pelvis (the fact men don’t give birth leads to some obvious differences) revealed that this is indeed a lady.
And there was more. The red colouring of the bones indicated she had been buried in a coffin, most likely one made of iron. The colouration was useful too when examining those bones which were broken. The fact that the edges of the fractures were white indicated this damage occurred long after death.
THIS sort of information might be of more interest to an archaeologist than a detective (the skeleton we were examining was found in Chichester and dates back to somewhere between 1700 and 1850) but many of the techniques are exactly the same as those seen on TV.
In Prof Rando’s department are scientists who specialise in everything from assessing how bodies decompose in water (particularly useful for plane crashes) to examining how animals in different areas interfere with burial sites. Every piece of research goes towards building up, er, a body of knowledge that is growing all the time and helping the police to solve ever more complex crimes.
However, the life of a forensic scientist isn’t quite what the TV studios might have led you to believe. Prof Rando says: “What the TV shows depict is so cool and interesting. It makes me wish my job was like that. It has raised some more awareness of the job of a forensic pathologist, though.”
That awareness is not always totally positive. She says: “It has influenced how juries understand forensics. It makes people think we can do analysis in a few hours but actually some of the things we do can take weeks.
“There is also this impression it’s way sexier than it is. You are literally in a lab wearing a white coat and doing experiments, watching test tubes go in and out of machines. It can take me a whole day just to examine a single skeleton.”
Not only are the TV directors ramping up the glamour they also like to suggest that forensic scientists are capable of finding out more than they actually can. “What they interpret on television is taking things a bit too far. For example it’s very difficult to age somebody if they were older than about 25. If you see them on TV saying, ‘They were between 30 and 32,’ it is
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TV series such as Bones and Silent Witness make us wonder what a career in the pathology lab is like. Lucky HARRY HODGES finds out