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Welcome to the first of this academic year's Mansfield Public talks.

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Those you don't know me. I'm head of Mansfield. I'm the principal here.

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And it's wonderful to see so many people. I'm delighted in particular to welcome you because this today is our second and Jocelyn Bell

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Burnell lecture in science in honour of our Professorial Fellow and then just Lynn Bell,

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Professor Belvin. And she's here, I'm very pleased to say. The reason we have a public lecture named for Jocelyn is because she discovered pulsars,

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the dead remnants of massive stars, which you get after a supernova explosion.

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When she was a graduate student at Cambridge.

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And the significance of that discovery was recognised by the award of the 1974 Nobel Prise in physics while she was still a graduate student.

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But despite Jocelyn being the person who discovered pulsars, which she's talked about in one of these talks,

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the prise was awarded to her supervisors, Anthony Hewish and Sir Martin Ryle.

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Jocelyn is the embodiment of modesty, and she defended that station and said, While I was just a research student at the time, that's how it works.

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But I know that we and I think now the world feel the injustice of that on her behalf.

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And we are very happy that since then Jocelyn has received very many honours.

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And when I just arrived here in 2018,

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she got a breakthrough prise for physics from the Fundamental Physics Prise Foundation, and she pledged all that money.

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And it was a lot of money to create scholarships for women and minority and

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refugee students to follow her footsteps and undertake research in physics.

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And she felt because I remember her saying that she did that because she felt that she had spotted something different, because she felt so different.

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And I think it's really important reason that diversity of thought matters.

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It's not just about fairness. It is about fairness.

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It's about people having ideas that interlink and make you think of things you hadn't thought about before.

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And it just is so very much an admirable thing about Jocelyn and something that we hope that we can develop here at Mansfield.

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Now, in 2021, Joslin joined Albert Einstein,

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Edwin Hubble and Stephen Hawking by becoming a recipient of the prestigious Royal Astronomical Society Gold Medal for Astronomy.

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And what happened since the last time we had one of these lectures. So we need to congratulate her on that.

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And she was also one of the small group of women scientists who set up the Athena Swan Charter,

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which is now used across the globe as a framework for transforming gender equality within higher education and research.

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So we're delighted that Jocelyn is professor and fellow here.

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We are delighted that we are able to honour her in this way.

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And we hold the Justin Burnell lecture in November because Jocelyn's discovery of pulsars is on the 28th of November 1967,

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and that's our way of honouring her incredible contribution to science and to encourage that kind of enquiry by everyone now.

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And we owe the presence of Jocelyn at our college to Professor Stephen Gandel, who's here tonight, and his wife Catherine Blundell,

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and who are a truly dynamic husband and wife team who both world leading scientists and professors at Oxford.

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And Catherine Blundell is at St John's where our speaker tonight, Steve Black, is the new president.

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And so Catherine and Stephen introduced to Mansfield and have been great champions of the establishment of his lectures.

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I want to thank the Plum Devils as well. And in a minute I'm going to hand over to Steve, who's going to be in conversation with our speaker,

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Professor Dame Sue Black, and then take questions from you.

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But I do just want, having said a great deal about Jocelyn, to welcome our speaker this year, Professor Dame Sue Black.

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It says a lot about the calibre of Jocelyn that because this other great Scottish

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scientist knows her for and they've known her for a long time and that she was,

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I think, pleased.

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And in her first term, first couple of weeks really at Oxford, was prepared to take on another thing and come and give this talk for us.

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So that's something else that we owe.

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Jocelyn Su is the words of the UK's leading forensic anthropologist, and her work has ranged from war crimes investigations,

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Kosovo to single suspicious deaths in the UK, everything in between.

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And she's been recognised nationally and internationally for her work in the fields of war crimes investigations, mass fatalities and other casework,

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and also recent research focussing on the identification of perpetrators of child sexual abuse from indecent images of children.

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It's very hard work.

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I am in awe of her for doing it and she's had a string of awards, which I'm not going to read out, but a lot of awards for this work.

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And Steve is going to talk to her about it and then take any questions from you.

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So thank you very much for coming tonight, I think.

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Well, thank you. Thank you, Helen. Thank you so much for being with us this evening.

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The first question I wanted to ask you were described by Helen as a forensic anthropologist.

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So what is a forensic anthropologist? So most people say, what's the difference between a forensic anthropologist and a forensic pathologist?

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And they usually say about a hundred thousand a year and salary is the difference between the two.

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So the forensic bit just tells you you're an expert when I'm sorry if I sound like a tuba, but.

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Well, welcome to Oxford. Precious flu, which I got a week ago, so I'm normally about an octave higher, so I do apologise for this.

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So the forensic bits comes from the Latin word forensics, which means pertaining to the forum and the forum of the courts of Rome.

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So fundamentally, anybody who's a forensic, anything, it just means that they take their anything into the courtroom and the anthropology,

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which is the Greek, it is the study of the human or what remains of the human.

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So when you put forensic anthropology together. Primarily it was this life for me about densification.

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What a pathologist will do is they will tell you about a cause of death or a manner of death.

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Our job is to say, who was this person when we're live?

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Or if I'm looking at images, is the person who's in the images the suspect that we.

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Oh, my. Is in the way I do. You know, I love this necklace.

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And I knew it was going to be problems from day one. So let's let's take that out of the way.

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Let's get rid of that and hopefully we'll be doing fine.

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Guess. So can you tell us what a forensic anthropologist is at some point in your life?

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You must have decided I want to be a forensic anthropologist.

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No, nobody wants to do that for a living, do they?

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You know, there's no career prospect in school that says, you know, I'm going to be a forensic anything, quite frankly.

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And it's a wonderful thing when you get to be so old that you can look back on your life

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and you can look at the path you've taken and you can find those crossroads and you say,

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Why did I make that decision at that crossroad? And it's only time that often allows you to do that.

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And so I've been doing a little bit of that of late, and I go far enough back.

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I think my father I was a daddy's girl. I adored my father.

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Any excuse I had, I was this little shadow. I went everywhere with them, God bless them.

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And my father was a great shot. And so he would go out shooting rabbits and deer and whatever it would be, it was always for the pulse.

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It was never for sports. Never, ever.

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And so from about four or five, I can remember walking back with my dad carrying rabbits or pheasants or whatever it may be.

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And my mother was a bit squeamish, so my mother was happy to cook them, but she was never happy to do anything else.

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So I had the excuse of sitting at the back door with my father,

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and he would teach me how to skin a rabbit or how to grow like a deer or pluck a pheasant or whatever.

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So from about five or six, I was really quite happy having hands covered in blood and having dead animals around me.

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It just it just seemed like a normal part of life.

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And then classic Scottish Presbyterian, as my father said to me when I was 12, what are you going to do for a job?

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And I thought he meant when I grew up. No, he meant when I was 12.

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What job are you going to get? Because his rationale was, you have five days in school.

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You have two days when you're doing nothing else. And that's the devil's work. So you have to be doing something for those two days.

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So go out and get a job and whatever job you get, half of your earnings must go to your mother for your board and lodgings.

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And so at 12, it seemed perfectly logical to get a job in a butcher shop.

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And so the entirety of my teenage years were in a butcher shop up to my elbows again,

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and blood and muscle and bone and feeling quite comfortable about that.

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All of my friends were working for fashion stores or the makeup counter on boots or whatever.

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But you know, I was up to here and liver and such things, just feeling, you know, it was a perfectly normal thing.

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And my biology teacher in school and teachers are so important.

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But my biology teacher said, when you go to university and I didn't know I could because nobody in my family had ever been to university.

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So I didn't know what that meant. But I just I worshipped this.

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There's a there's a sort of repeating history of me worshipping men in my life.

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And I don't mean that I really don't. But he was just my favourite teacher.

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I just adored him and I still talk to him to this day. And he said, You know, you need to go to university.

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So I wanted to be a biologist like him. And my first two years in university, I had no idea of why I was there.

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I was so bored and I couldn't see any point to what I was doing.

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Forgive me for the for the botanists in the room.

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But, you know, I cut so many plant stems and half with a razor blade, I never understood the point of why I was doing it.

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I had petri dishes full of dead fruit flies,

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figuring out whether they had rounded bottoms or pointed bottoms because it had something to do with genetics that I never understood.

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And by the end of the second year, I was really questioning, what am I doing here?

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And in the third year, they gave me the opportunity to go into the anatomy departments.

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And of course, the anatomy department is just a butcher shop with a different animal.

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And so that Rubicon of crossing into a dissecting room and knowing that the person in front of you.

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Actually gave their remains solely the purpose for you to learn that really

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important moments that I thought nobody is ever going to give me a gift like.

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This is what the value and the cost of education is about.

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And so dissecting what we did was we dissected a human from the top of the head to the bottom of the toe,

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took an entire year to do, and I knew I'd come home.

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That was where I was comfortable. So at that point I thought, okay, I'm going to be an anatomist.

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And in anatomy, most of the research projects we're doing things like LED levels in rat brain or carcinoma in hamster pituitary.

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And I have a pathological fear of rodents.

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So my girls have never had a pet hamster, gerbil, mice or anything.

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In my books, the only good rodent is a dead rodent.

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And so there was no way I was ever going to pick a dead rat out of a bucket to do anything with it.

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And so I went to the member of staff and said, What else can I do?

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And she said, Well, why don't you think about looking at human remains and how can you identify people from human remains?

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And that's where my research project went.

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When I was in, I think it was about the first year of my Ph.D. There was a case came into the Department of Forensic case,

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and I'm so old that these were in the days before DNA was being used in a forensic investigation.

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And this case resulted from an individual who had was flying a microlight.

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And the microlight crashed off the east coast of Scotland and his body went into the sea.

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And it was a couple of weeks before a body was washed ashore and a couple of weeks in the North Sea.

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You're not pretty. But by the time you come in and there had obviously been some damage to the area around the head

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and the means of identification at that time was could you identify somebody from their face?

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But the face was just not usable because of the saltwater.

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The fingerprints had gone, so you couldn't use that. There had been so much damage to the face.

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We couldn't use the teeth and there was no DNA.

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So the question was this body that came in. How likely was it to have been the young man who went missing on the microlight?

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Now, what we could tell is from enough of the soft tissue that it was a male,

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that it was a young male of the right sort of age, that the height was about right and the ethnicity was about right.

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And that's okay. But that just tells you you've got a man between 25 and 35, four, 8 to 5 foot ten and height and point.

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That doesn't tell you it's the person. And so you then have to start looking at the identifying features.

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And we identified that he had a birthmark just below his left nipple.

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So we spoke to his mother and his mother said, my son had no birthmark.

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My son was perfect. I thought, Oh, no, that's difficult.

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We spoke to his girlfriend and his girlfriend said, Yeah, of course, he's got a birthmark and.

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Really important that when you're asking the question of somebody, that you ask the question of somebody who notes the intimacy,

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often your mother, the last person to know what you you may be hiding underneath your clothes.

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You may need to speak to somebody more personal. But the importance of that was once the girlfriend.

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When we released the body, the Procurator Fiscal was happy that it would be that individual.

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That girlfriend accepted it. But the mother never did.

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She never accepted it was the body of something which is no problem do the DNA test.

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But at that time we couldn't.

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And that was a real challenge to say not only are we perhaps in some cases, looking at identifying someone for the purposes of the courts,

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but we're actually trying to convince family that the body we're giving back is the person that they're missing.

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And sometimes family don't want to know that because they want to be able to keep the hope alive that the person is.

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And sometimes we bring back is really hard.

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That was a really long answer to say, why did I want to become a forensic anthropologist?

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I didn't. It just kind of happens that way.

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So you you you found that career path by a security route and that you've clearly thrived in this and been extraordinarily successful.

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What is it you think makes a good forensic anthropologist?

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A huge amount of curiosity. So you never accept anybody's word for anything, which, again, I know I can hear that I've got problems on this as well.

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So not quite working. I mean, I'm happy to.

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It's still here. Let's try it again.

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But maybe. Sounds like the battery is gone.

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I don't know if there's a spare one. It might be something. I'm happy to use that if you are.

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Yeah, that's no trouble at all. So what was the question?

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What makes a good for a good forensic anthropologist? First of all, they need a curiosity.

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So you never believe anything that anybody tells you,

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because there is always more than one side to any story and you need to be able to listen to all sides.

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Your job as you go into the courtroom is to be an impartial scientist.

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And you can't be an impartial scientist if you're only listening to one side of the story.

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You have to listen to all sides. So we like to ask a lot of questions.

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For an anthropologist, I think you need to be an anatomist.

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There is a lot of training that is done on human skeletal remains, but the skeleton is just a small part of the entirety of the body.

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So you really need to understand all of the soft tissue as much as you do the heart tissue.

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You need to have skin that's as thick as a rhino because if you're going to be a forensic, anything,

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those lovely lawyers that we have in the courtroom, she says, looking at Helen, their job is to make your life difficult.

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And so you really have to be almost unflappable in difficult circumstances, and you have to have a really strong stomach.

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So you have to be prepared for what you can't be prepared for.

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And often in a team, the police who are in that team or the military or in that team will look to you as a scientist,

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too, to not be affected by what is going on around you.

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And you become an anchor in many ways for those teams.

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So you do have to be very, very carefully grounded in what you do.

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I mean, you mentioned there about the relationships you have in your role with with other bodies.

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I mean, one of those is the police. So working as a scientist with the police.

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How how does that work? Do they do they respect you or do they.

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You'd have to ask them if they respect me.

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I have never found and we talk about police and military, not so much these days, but in the past there's been quite a misogynistic approach.

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I've never had that. I have never in any way felt that I have been treated negatively because of a female.

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In fact, quite the opposite. So if you imagine in Kosovo, we're at a crime scene and it is in the middle of nowhere.

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It is not like CSI. If you think CSI is what the reality of, it's like, it really isn't.

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We have no running water. We've got no electricity.

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There's no security. I mean, it really is quite grim.

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And, you know, when you're the only woman on the team, these are very obvious things.

194
00:18:59,450 --> 00:19:07,880
But you monitor how little you drink because if water goes in one end of you, it has to come out the other end of you.

195
00:19:08,360 --> 00:19:14,650
And whilst it's easier for men because they will find a tree, it's much more difficult for women.

196
00:19:15,020 --> 00:19:17,180
And I find that the men in the team,

197
00:19:17,420 --> 00:19:25,850
they recognise that there were some situations that were more challenging for a woman and they never, ever made you feel uncomfortable.

198
00:19:26,180 --> 00:19:28,820
So I thought I was very, very lucky.

199
00:19:29,210 --> 00:19:36,470
But that doesn't make you immune to the fact that when you're a part of that team, they're not going to cut you any slack.

200
00:19:36,560 --> 00:19:37,610
Absolutely none.

201
00:19:38,090 --> 00:19:47,720
So we had a mortuary in Kosovo, which was a disused grain store, and they knew that my my fear of rodents was was a real fear of rodents.

202
00:19:48,140 --> 00:19:54,770
So the military, God bless them, they'd go into the mortuary first thing in the morning, make a load of noise, frighten all the mice and the rats out.

203
00:19:54,770 --> 00:19:58,520
And then it would be, you know, in you go. Now, I've done my bit. Get on with that girl.

204
00:19:58,970 --> 00:20:07,040
Or when we were at Pontecorvo Meat Market, one of the techniques that they had was that they would dig a mass grave,

205
00:20:07,040 --> 00:20:11,630
the bodies would go in and they would place something like a horse or a cow on the top.

206
00:20:11,960 --> 00:20:17,300
So when you smell decomposing, the expectation as you dug down was you'd find an animal.

207
00:20:17,720 --> 00:20:24,020
And so we were digging in podia of a meat market one day and you're sitting on the on the bumper of the car,

208
00:20:24,020 --> 00:20:27,950
and you could see that they'd hit something. And I went to move forward.

209
00:20:28,220 --> 00:20:31,910
And one of the officers bear in mind that they're carrying firearms at stay.

210
00:20:32,240 --> 00:20:36,200
And when an officer with the firearms says stay, you genuinely do stay.

211
00:20:36,500 --> 00:20:43,460
And what had happened was they'd hit this liquid horse and it was a rat's nest within the liquid horse.

212
00:20:43,670 --> 00:20:47,870
And so, of course, all the rats shot off, down, down, the sort of, you know, rat tunnels.

213
00:20:48,290 --> 00:20:52,220
And then once they'd gone, you went, okay, now get into the hole with the liquid horse.

214
00:20:52,520 --> 00:20:57,500
So there's no suggesting that as a as a girl, you're going to need any special treatment.

215
00:20:57,800 --> 00:21:01,790
But they were also sensitive enough to know that that was my genuine jumper.

216
00:21:02,330 --> 00:21:05,120
But they weren't going to treat you any differently whatsoever.

217
00:21:05,120 --> 00:21:10,340
Get in the hole with a liquid horse and you knew you were going to smell bad for weeks on end when it came to that.

218
00:21:11,000 --> 00:21:16,700
So moving on from the police side, you also mentioned about working with with lawyers.

219
00:21:17,160 --> 00:21:21,549
And I'm a physicist, so I'm used to have. A scientific idea.

220
00:21:21,550 --> 00:21:25,720
I'm working on questions by colleagues in the in the part of scientific debate.

221
00:21:26,050 --> 00:21:31,780
But that works within a framework of respect about certain ways of arguing.

222
00:21:32,740 --> 00:21:36,879
Inevitably you get called into a courtroom where there's two sides and it's

223
00:21:36,880 --> 00:21:42,100
adversarial and there might be a side that's higher to you or is in the crown,

224
00:21:42,100 --> 00:21:49,149
for example. And there's another side that's trying to show that somebody is innocent of whatever crime the crown is being produced by.

225
00:21:49,150 --> 00:21:52,660
And you have the lawyers then insisting he was an expert witness.

226
00:21:53,350 --> 00:21:57,520
So that's a very different kind of way of having your science being examined.

227
00:21:57,610 --> 00:22:06,370
And there are there are good lawyers and there are bad. So I have had some experiences in court where it has been so utterly fair.

228
00:22:06,820 --> 00:22:12,610
And you think those are the good quality lawyers who are there to question you on your evidence?

229
00:22:12,610 --> 00:22:20,080
And that's what we're there for, is to have our evidence questioned. And you need to be prepared as a scientist that you are impartial.

230
00:22:20,110 --> 00:22:28,299
You might have have produced your report at the request of the prosecution or the defence, but it shouldn't make any difference which side.

231
00:22:28,300 --> 00:22:31,710
You're not on sides. When you go into the courtroom, you are an impartial scientist.

232
00:22:31,930 --> 00:22:41,440
Your evidence should be the same on either side. There are some lawyers where it really is a gladiatorial arena and it is going to be an arena.

233
00:22:41,920 --> 00:22:48,770
And whoever credit the the witness. Well, not necessarily to discredit the expert witness.

234
00:22:48,770 --> 00:22:54,310
Some some will try to do that if they feel that's something that will be beneficial to their case.

235
00:22:54,670 --> 00:23:02,560
But their case is about representing their clients and they have to represent their clients as best as they think and feel they're able to do.

236
00:23:02,950 --> 00:23:06,550
And there are some that will use some tactics and others who simply won't.

237
00:23:07,030 --> 00:23:11,830
And so we often find that that lawyers will come after us in three ways.

238
00:23:12,130 --> 00:23:15,910
So the first one will come in after our evidence, and that's exactly what they should be doing.

239
00:23:16,180 --> 00:23:20,500
It's about testing the science, testing the theory. How sure can you be?

240
00:23:20,530 --> 00:23:26,259
Are there other options that perhaps you haven't thought about and where an expert witness makes a mistake?

241
00:23:26,260 --> 00:23:31,540
Often as they feel, I'm a prosecution witness, so my job is to support the prosecution case.

242
00:23:31,570 --> 00:23:35,770
No, it's not. That's not your job at all. Your job is to help the jury.

243
00:23:35,980 --> 00:23:40,240
And the jury are the most important people in that courtroom because they're the ones who will decide.

244
00:23:40,600 --> 00:23:46,480
And we have to try and explain the evidence to them so that they can make a sound decision.

245
00:23:47,020 --> 00:23:53,140
So our evidence is fine sometimes. So they will come after you in terms of processes and procedures.

246
00:23:53,560 --> 00:24:03,790
And I've seen a colleague really just brought down in courts because the question was, how long did you spend looking down a microscope?

247
00:24:04,300 --> 00:24:08,410
To which the answer she gave was, I don't know, was about ten, maybe 12 hours.

248
00:24:08,950 --> 00:24:15,040
What do you mean you don't know? Isn't the job of an expert witness to record everything you do?

249
00:24:15,340 --> 00:24:23,530
So shouldn't your notes have the point at which you went onto the computer under the microscope and the point to which you came off?

250
00:24:23,530 --> 00:24:28,540
So you should be able to tell me to the minutes to the hour, how many hours you spent.

251
00:24:28,870 --> 00:24:32,890
If you can't keep that level of notes, what kind of an expert witness are you?

252
00:24:33,220 --> 00:24:39,100
And I just it was just awful to watch. You could see that she didn't have the rebuttal skills that she needed.

253
00:24:39,370 --> 00:24:43,030
And so at the end of the day, they decided that she was not a credible witness.

254
00:24:43,480 --> 00:24:50,530
And so she literally was taken out of the courtroom on the fact that she hadn't written down how many hours she had spent on a microscope.

255
00:24:51,190 --> 00:24:53,950
And if they can't get to you on that, they'll come after you personally.

256
00:24:54,490 --> 00:25:01,600
And by that I mean they will give the junior lawyers free rein to say, go see what you can find on social media,

257
00:25:01,780 --> 00:25:08,260
on Facebook, on Twitter, on whatever, because we're looking for a way that that will give us an inroad.

258
00:25:08,710 --> 00:25:17,230
So I've seen a colleague who they went online and finds a lecture that she gave ten years before they brought it in and said,

259
00:25:17,290 --> 00:25:20,530
ten years ago, you said this. Here's the lecture that you gave.

260
00:25:20,890 --> 00:25:25,180
Goodness knows when you're not saying something different. So what's happened in between?

261
00:25:25,570 --> 00:25:29,380
So sometimes you've no way of knowing what's going to come at you.

262
00:25:29,920 --> 00:25:33,909
And I had a truly horrendous moment where it wasn't me that had the horrendous moment.

263
00:25:33,910 --> 00:25:34,990
It was my young colleague.

264
00:25:35,440 --> 00:25:43,719
And I gave evidence, first of all, and it was fine because it was after my my evidence that they went and that that was absolutely fine.

265
00:25:43,720 --> 00:25:52,510
But when they got to him, that they went after him personally and they said to him, What's your relationship with Professor Black?

266
00:25:53,140 --> 00:25:58,900
And he said, Well, she's my head of department. They went, Oh, no, I think it's more than that, isn't it?

267
00:25:59,260 --> 00:26:05,470
And he said, I could feel my face getting better. And he said, The redder I got, the more guilty I felt about something I'd not done.

268
00:26:06,100 --> 00:26:13,459
And and he said, Well, I don't know what you mean. And he said, Well, I think it's a bit bit of a stronger relationship than that, isn't it?

269
00:26:13,460 --> 00:26:18,250
And he said, no, it absolutely certainly isn't. But they were just trying to rattle him.

270
00:26:18,610 --> 00:26:22,419
And if at any point that there had been something inappropriate happening,

271
00:26:22,420 --> 00:26:25,989
which there wasn't, then, you know, he might have said, oh, yes, you're right.

272
00:26:25,990 --> 00:26:31,960
You know, we have had a bit of a fling or whatever. And that was just their way, too, to get.

273
00:26:32,290 --> 00:26:37,269
To him and to and to rattle him now often will find that judges in court will say,

274
00:26:37,270 --> 00:26:41,590
you're expert witnesses, your big boys and girls, you know, sort of out for yourself.

275
00:26:41,800 --> 00:26:47,800
And often they won't step in, whereas they will step in when it's witnesses who are members of the public, for example,

276
00:26:48,070 --> 00:26:53,470
because there is a bit more of a protection there for us in many ways, we kind of get left to of our own devices.

277
00:26:53,890 --> 00:26:58,780
But I have an arch nemesis in Scotland who is called Donald Finlay, who's now Casey.

278
00:26:59,170 --> 00:27:07,330
And I love Donald Finlay because you know that when you get on the stand with him, he is going to give you the roughest time you could imagine.

279
00:27:07,780 --> 00:27:14,620
And I met up with Donald. He had cross-examined me for about 4 hours in a particular murder enquiry.

280
00:27:15,070 --> 00:27:18,850
And afterwards I said, Donald, you were really hard on me in there.

281
00:27:19,150 --> 00:27:22,959
He said, I, he said, I like to get you in court.

282
00:27:22,960 --> 00:27:26,650
It's a bit of a challenge. These pathologists are easy, he says.

283
00:27:26,830 --> 00:27:36,520
And you think, I don't want to be your challenge? But it but it is really an alien place at times for a scientist to be, I think.

284
00:27:36,520 --> 00:27:41,440
I think it was also a great encouragement for any science students who hear about record keeping.

285
00:27:41,500 --> 00:27:46,000
Oh, please. Yes. You're never going to regret keeping too many records.

286
00:27:46,000 --> 00:27:51,940
Not ever. And every photograph take another ten, because the very photograph you want will be the one that you didn't take.

287
00:27:51,940 --> 00:27:54,940
And times and dates and times and data and sound.

288
00:27:55,090 --> 00:27:55,960
Yep. Yes.

289
00:27:56,410 --> 00:28:03,760
Well, when you when you're coming to do your work identifying a body and maybe even you got, you've only got bones and maybe not an entire skeleton.

290
00:28:04,270 --> 00:28:09,520
What's the what's the bone you most hope to find that's going to be the most important, most informative.

291
00:28:10,150 --> 00:28:16,690
Well, I mean, given a straight choice, I'd rather have a whole body is the truth, because then there's so much more information that you can get.

292
00:28:18,550 --> 00:28:26,470
One of my areas of expertise is in human dismemberment, and so there isn't necessarily a favourite parts,

293
00:28:26,830 --> 00:28:30,220
but there are different parts of the body that will tell you different things.

294
00:28:30,640 --> 00:28:37,720
And so if you're particularly, you know, even if it's just skeletal and we're looking for evidence, is this masculine and feminine,

295
00:28:37,990 --> 00:28:43,750
then I'd quite like to have a bit of pelvis and I'd like to have a bit of skull if we're looking at is this a child?

296
00:28:43,750 --> 00:28:48,040
And I'd quite like to have a bit of legs. Thank you very much indeed. It just differs.

297
00:28:48,310 --> 00:28:52,180
But there's a lovely bone, you know, there's a favourite bone, I have to say,

298
00:28:52,180 --> 00:28:57,129
if I'm allowed to have one, and it's the one that sits just under your collar.

299
00:28:57,130 --> 00:29:02,709
So it's your collarbone, your clavicle, when it was being designed, you know, whoever designs us,

300
00:29:02,710 --> 00:29:08,380
and that's up to everybody independently what fun they had with this bone, because it's a ridiculous shape.

301
00:29:08,800 --> 00:29:15,459
First of all, it doesn't do anything functional at all. You can actually remove the clavicle and providing you stitch the muscles back together again.

302
00:29:15,460 --> 00:29:16,180
You don't need it.

303
00:29:16,630 --> 00:29:24,190
And in fact, jockeys used to have the clavicles removed because if you fall off your horse, it's the bone that's most likely to be fractured.

304
00:29:24,400 --> 00:29:29,320
And there's some very big blood vessels underneath there. So you want to avoid them if you possibly can.

305
00:29:29,590 --> 00:29:31,900
So if you can remove them, so much the better.

306
00:29:32,140 --> 00:29:39,130
So you don't really need them, but they're the first bone that starts to form in you as a foetus when you're inside your mum.

307
00:29:39,370 --> 00:29:46,840
So just in the first few weeks, within sort of 6 to 8 weeks of, of you being made, that bone is starting to form.

308
00:29:46,990 --> 00:29:51,460
And I think that that's really, that's a really cool thing to be is the first one.

309
00:29:52,090 --> 00:29:57,430
And it's so it forms in the shape that stays with you for the rest of your life.

310
00:29:57,760 --> 00:30:04,750
So onto genetically it is fit for purpose, whatever that purpose is, because it doesn't change its shape.

311
00:30:05,320 --> 00:30:15,639
And as you're a baby growing, it adds about a millimetre a month so that you can age a baby really very accurately from the length of their clavicles,

312
00:30:15,640 --> 00:30:20,560
which is why that's the bone quite often that they will look at. They'll look at the femur, but they'll also look at the clavicle.

313
00:30:20,560 --> 00:30:26,230
How long is it once you're you're born, that's the bone that survives the best.

314
00:30:26,560 --> 00:30:33,910
So wherever we're looking at bones through fire or explosion, I can pretty well guarantee the two areas I'll find will be the collarbone.

315
00:30:34,150 --> 00:30:38,050
And a bit of this at the base of your skull. That's called the sort of mastoid area.

316
00:30:38,500 --> 00:30:43,810
So they survive really well, and they're also the last bone to stop growing.

317
00:30:44,110 --> 00:30:51,670
So when the rest of your body has stopped at the end of being a teenager, this bit just in the middle here keeps growing until you're about 25.

318
00:30:51,940 --> 00:30:56,920
And that's really useful for us in age estimation. So it's got so much going for it.

319
00:30:57,640 --> 00:31:04,720
And I just love the fact that it's called the clavicle. It comes from the word clavicle, which is the shape of a Roman key.

320
00:31:04,930 --> 00:31:09,460
I just love the idea that you have this key that sits underneath your collarbone.

321
00:31:09,640 --> 00:31:12,670
So I kind of like the clavicle. It's a it's a bit of a soft spot for me.

322
00:31:14,100 --> 00:31:19,980
You said you were an expert in dismemberment. You've worked on a number of a murder case.

323
00:31:20,490 --> 00:31:22,890
I guess in the loss of and a lot of murder cases.

324
00:31:23,280 --> 00:31:29,370
People are doing it for the first time and they've got into some shocking situation that they haven't been able to get out of.

325
00:31:29,370 --> 00:31:37,010
And they're they're not professionals yet, which means that mistakes are made and they're probably trying to hide the evidence.

326
00:31:37,020 --> 00:31:43,890
So that's something. Yes. I mean, most people do not set out to murder someone else for whatever the television tells us,

327
00:31:44,130 --> 00:31:47,550
whatever CSI programmes tell us, whatever the novels tell us.

328
00:31:47,580 --> 00:31:50,910
Most people do not set out to murder somebody else.

329
00:31:51,270 --> 00:31:57,540
It usually happens in a moment of passion, whether it is fuelled by drugs or it's fuelled by alcohol.

330
00:31:57,870 --> 00:32:03,900
And you find yourself in a position you've lashed out, and now you have a situation where you have a body.

331
00:32:04,470 --> 00:32:10,260
Most people will feel suitably shocked that they will confess at that point.

332
00:32:10,260 --> 00:32:14,850
They will phone for an ambulance, they will phone for whatever, and the body will be found.

333
00:32:15,150 --> 00:32:19,650
But there are a few individuals who do have that panic of thinking, What do I do?

334
00:32:19,830 --> 00:32:24,390
And they may have watched the television. They may have have read the books.

335
00:32:24,720 --> 00:32:27,810
And it makes it sound as if it's really easy and it isn't.

336
00:32:28,110 --> 00:32:32,250
Human bodies are heavy things, and they're not very cooperative.

337
00:32:32,520 --> 00:32:38,670
They've got arms and legs that fluff about. And so they tend to also be a little bit wet.

338
00:32:39,090 --> 00:32:46,500
So whether we're talking about vomit or we're talking about other parts of body suppressants, they're often not very pleasant to handle.

339
00:32:46,980 --> 00:32:51,970
So you're faced with it and you think, What do I do with it? And the question is, I need to get rid of it.

340
00:32:51,990 --> 00:33:00,510
And usually what happens is the person who's responsible wants to try and get as much distance between themselves and the body as they possibly can.

341
00:33:01,020 --> 00:33:05,969
And they think, Where do I put it? You will find bodies that are secreted in houses.

342
00:33:05,970 --> 00:33:11,010
You'll find them underneath floorboards, or you'll find them in a cupboard in an attic.

343
00:33:11,310 --> 00:33:16,560
Used to be that babies were often found up chimneys behind bath panels.

344
00:33:16,800 --> 00:33:19,410
All of these sorts of places where you can hide a body.

345
00:33:20,040 --> 00:33:28,890
But very quickly you realise that bodies are anti-social things and they start to smell and smell badly very, very quickly.

346
00:33:29,340 --> 00:33:35,070
So you suddenly realise, even though you might have lived with it for a few days, you can't keep on living with it.

347
00:33:35,520 --> 00:33:41,070
So now you have to dispose of it and some people will go in the back of the car.

348
00:33:41,430 --> 00:33:45,240
So in the boot of the car, I need to get rid of it. Where will I go?

349
00:33:45,600 --> 00:33:47,940
They will often go to somewhere that they know.

350
00:33:48,270 --> 00:33:54,960
And of course it's really difficult to not be caught on an automatic number plate recognition anywhere in the UK at the moment.

351
00:33:55,170 --> 00:34:04,049
So people will be able to follow your car. Bodies tend to end up in bodies of water so that we often find them in rivers or we find them in

352
00:34:04,050 --> 00:34:10,290
locks or we find them being washed in ashore because people think we can just dump them out to sea.

353
00:34:10,290 --> 00:34:14,790
So bodies keep returning. They're like boomerangs. You can't really throw them away.

354
00:34:14,790 --> 00:34:18,089
They will come back and some people will think, well, actually,

355
00:34:18,090 --> 00:34:26,070
it might be better if I if I can cut the body into pieces because it's really heavy and it's really difficult to move a whole body.

356
00:34:26,430 --> 00:34:31,860
So I'll put it into pieces and most bodies will go into five pieces.

357
00:34:32,160 --> 00:34:38,670
So you have to offer limbs to lower limbs and a trunk. Very bad idea to try to separate the trunk.

358
00:34:39,060 --> 00:34:44,730
You do that. It's very messy. It's very smelly and it's really very unpleasant.

359
00:34:44,730 --> 00:34:52,080
So best not to address the question. Do most people have, you know, the determination to remove a head?

360
00:34:52,380 --> 00:34:59,550
Removing the head is actually really challenging. So it's that as the head and the trunk and to upper limbs and to lower limbs.

361
00:35:00,030 --> 00:35:06,870
So you think, well, it must be easy to take a limb off and most people will go to the kitchen and in the kitchen you'll find a knife.

362
00:35:07,260 --> 00:35:14,430
And so they start cutting. And then suddenly they realise as they're trying to get through an arm, a bone is a really difficult thing to cut through.

363
00:35:14,970 --> 00:35:19,380
So you will often see the first place that they have gone to in the dismemberment.

364
00:35:19,680 --> 00:35:25,290
You have several of these attempts to cut the body and they think this isn't working.

365
00:35:25,560 --> 00:35:28,860
What else can I do? This is somebody who's learning on the job.

366
00:35:29,490 --> 00:35:33,480
So it's saying, okay, this doesn't work for us will work. I've got a saw in the shed.

367
00:35:34,080 --> 00:35:37,709
And so they'll go and they'll get a sore and they'll realise that you can't

368
00:35:37,710 --> 00:35:43,560
actually cut through skin with a saw because the blade catches up so they realise,

369
00:35:43,560 --> 00:35:45,540
okay, I have to cut the soft tissue first,

370
00:35:45,870 --> 00:35:53,339
then I have to try to solve through the bone or if it's not sawing they might use if they have a blade in the kitchen,

371
00:35:53,340 --> 00:35:57,780
for example, you know, one of these meat cleavers, that might be the kind of thing they do.

372
00:35:58,260 --> 00:36:05,340
So the first limb they remove is usually a mess, a complete and utter mess, but they've learnt in the first limb how to take it off.

373
00:36:05,700 --> 00:36:09,120
So by the second limb you see it's a much cleaner removal.

374
00:36:09,300 --> 00:36:13,080
And so for the third and so for the fourth. And how many times?

375
00:36:13,220 --> 00:36:17,090
When you're walking along the street, do you see somebody pulling a suitcase?

376
00:36:17,420 --> 00:36:26,750
Nobody thinks what's in the suitcase. And so you often find that body parts get transported from one place to another inside suitcases.

377
00:36:27,170 --> 00:36:33,770
But that just dismemberment leaves a tremendous number of clues because it leaves a dreadful mess.

378
00:36:34,160 --> 00:36:36,530
So where are people most likely to do it?

379
00:36:36,950 --> 00:36:45,319
Well, the most likely to do it in a bathroom, because in a bathroom, you have a piece of furniture that is already the size of a human body.

380
00:36:45,320 --> 00:36:49,790
It's called a bath. And so a body fits into a bath rather nicely.

381
00:36:49,790 --> 00:36:56,860
It's got a drain, which means that a lot of the fluids go down the drain and it's got a water source, which means that you can wash it down.

382
00:36:56,870 --> 00:37:01,129
So we're going to go to a bathroom. First of all, if they've used a cleaver or if they've used a soul,

383
00:37:01,130 --> 00:37:05,420
we're going to have the marks on the side of the bath that shows what happened there.

384
00:37:05,630 --> 00:37:10,760
And when we go down those drains, we're going to find all of the detritus that you would expect.

385
00:37:11,300 --> 00:37:15,950
So there are well described patterns of what we expect to find.

386
00:37:16,160 --> 00:37:24,020
We never expect somebody to be particularly efficient because most of us have never dismembered and will never dismember.

387
00:37:24,530 --> 00:37:27,860
But we did have a case where a gentleman was dismembered.

388
00:37:28,580 --> 00:37:36,170
And my colleague and I, we looked at it and we went, this is somebody who knows what they're doing.

389
00:37:36,710 --> 00:37:40,520
And of course, the question from the police is, well, who's got that level of expertise?

390
00:37:40,700 --> 00:37:45,019
A fellow forensic anthropologist could do it. You know, a surgeon could do it.

391
00:37:45,020 --> 00:37:54,530
A vet could do it. Maybe a nurse could do it because the body was jointed and had gone through literally the major joints to separate.

392
00:37:55,160 --> 00:38:03,530
And what we found out was that there are a certain group of individuals usually associated with the drug gangs and the major drug gangs.

393
00:38:03,830 --> 00:38:08,090
And their job is to be a cutter. And they are trained how to dismember bodies.

394
00:38:08,630 --> 00:38:15,260
And so if somebody wants to to lose somebody, so you've got a murder victim, you take them round the back of the nightclub.

395
00:38:15,500 --> 00:38:20,990
The cutter cuts the body into pieces, the dumper takes the pieces and gets rid of it.

396
00:38:21,260 --> 00:38:30,889
And that's the last you see of the individual. I never knew in my life that there was a career opportunity as a cutter for a drug gang,

397
00:38:30,890 --> 00:38:36,740
and I suspect they are more in the process of cutting than we certainly did in our forensic investigation.

398
00:38:37,130 --> 00:38:44,680
Yeah. So so when you watch a detective show on the television or read a crime novel, I.

399
00:38:44,840 --> 00:38:51,770
I know you know well, MacDermott, but we're in Oxford, so I guess we should talk about Inspector Morse or Lewis or Endeavour.

400
00:38:52,010 --> 00:38:59,389
So when you watch one of those shows and they have somebody who will be a forensic pathologist or whatever working at the time of the body and going,

401
00:38:59,390 --> 00:39:03,440
Oh, yes, their stopwatches stopped at precisely this time. That's the time of death.

402
00:39:03,770 --> 00:39:09,770
So how do you feel when you watch those kinds of. My husband's is banned from watching them.

403
00:39:09,770 --> 00:39:13,670
I'm not I'm not allowed because I get so utterly incensed.

404
00:39:14,000 --> 00:39:17,270
But I did love watching Morse. And I used to watch Morse with the story.

405
00:39:17,480 --> 00:39:19,370
Now I watch and go that St Giles.

406
00:39:19,700 --> 00:39:25,420
So I'm so totally Oxford now that I'm looking at what's going on and not really interested in the count, let's call it.

407
00:39:25,910 --> 00:39:31,760
I know it's not St Johns, but it's definitely not ours. So I sort of look at it now in an entirely different light.

408
00:39:31,760 --> 00:39:36,740
So it's a sort of architectural investigation for me, no more than it was,

409
00:39:37,370 --> 00:39:42,200
but it's bearing in mind that these things are about entertainment, they're not about education.

410
00:39:42,560 --> 00:39:46,670
And, you know, you can't let reality get in the way of a good story.

411
00:39:46,670 --> 00:39:55,190
You just can't. And so for many of these, it's a necessary part of the story that you just stretch the truth a little bit.

412
00:39:55,190 --> 00:40:01,009
But I don't watch them. But the some of the crime writers and you mentioned Val, are really very,

413
00:40:01,010 --> 00:40:07,010
very focussed on getting the experience as realistic as they can because they

414
00:40:07,010 --> 00:40:11,480
respect the reader and the reader will know when it sounds as if it's not true.

415
00:40:11,780 --> 00:40:16,429
And so they want to get as close to it as they possibly can. So Val's a dreadful woman.

416
00:40:16,430 --> 00:40:22,910
She's a really good friend of mine's a dreadful woman. And she'll phone me up and she'll say, Oh, what are you working on at the moment?

417
00:40:23,300 --> 00:40:26,330
And you think she's looking for a story? That's what she's doing.

418
00:40:26,540 --> 00:40:32,120
And she will get my research into one of her novels before I've got it into a scientific paper.

419
00:40:32,450 --> 00:40:36,010
And you suddenly think, Oh my goodness me, if I end up in a courtroom and, you know,

420
00:40:36,020 --> 00:40:44,360
I'm being I'm being questioned on the the fiction of what my science is from a McDermid book rather than the reality that will be a first,

421
00:40:44,360 --> 00:40:48,980
but it's never got there. But they really do want to get as close as they can.

422
00:40:49,190 --> 00:40:53,750
So for me, it's a busman's holiday that they will send me a chapter and say, Does this sound right?

423
00:40:54,080 --> 00:40:57,680
What do I need to do differently? Would they say this? Would they do that?

424
00:40:57,920 --> 00:41:01,999
And that for me is a bit of fun. But I'd never write something in that genre.

425
00:41:02,000 --> 00:41:02,750
Never? No.

426
00:41:03,740 --> 00:41:09,530
I just want to ask you one more thing before I open it up to the audience, because I'm sure there are people here who have questions to ask.

427
00:41:09,530 --> 00:41:16,339
But you're dealing in your working life as a forensic anthropologist with some pretty tough things.

428
00:41:16,340 --> 00:41:23,040
You've worked in Kosovo. You've worked. The aftermath of the tsunami in Indonesia.

429
00:41:23,050 --> 00:41:29,040
You've worked with a number of grisly cases and you're there at the sharp end of that life and death.

430
00:41:29,050 --> 00:41:31,390
And of course, we will all end up one day as the body.

431
00:41:33,200 --> 00:41:39,920
What do you think is a unique position that you're in and seeing life through that particular lens?

432
00:41:40,760 --> 00:41:49,760
What perspectives does that give you on life? I was very lucky as I grew up on the west coast of Scotland and my best friend was my grandmother

433
00:41:50,210 --> 00:41:56,990
and my grandmother was a classic Scottish West Coaster who believed in a life beyond this one.

434
00:41:57,590 --> 00:42:01,730
And so I used to have the most wonderful conversations with my grandmother as a child,

435
00:42:02,210 --> 00:42:07,340
and she believed that death walked alongside you every moment of your waking day.

436
00:42:07,940 --> 00:42:11,150
And she believed that if if death was your constant companion,

437
00:42:11,540 --> 00:42:15,770
you better make a friend out of it because you don't want to walk every day of your life with an enemy.

438
00:42:16,220 --> 00:42:23,360
And she grew up in a little place called Glenelg in the 1800s, and she was not allowed to have a man who was a friend.

439
00:42:23,690 --> 00:42:28,130
And so death to her was always a woman. So in my family, death was always a shame.

440
00:42:28,520 --> 00:42:34,310
And somehow that she takes a little bit of sting out of it, takes a little bit of aggression out of it.

441
00:42:34,490 --> 00:42:38,480
There's a kindness in death. There's a real compassion in death.

442
00:42:38,960 --> 00:42:46,820
And I was honoured to be with my father as he took his last breath, who, as I said, she was the most important person in my life.

443
00:42:47,150 --> 00:42:52,459
But my grandmother said to him, When your father dies because it's her son, when your father dies, you need to be there.

444
00:42:52,460 --> 00:43:02,090
He won't want to die on his own. And so he had a horrendous dementia towards the end, and he was non-communicative for about a year.

445
00:43:02,510 --> 00:43:06,979
And on the nights when he was dying and I'd said to him, Right, Dad, I'm going home now.

446
00:43:06,980 --> 00:43:14,870
I'll be back in the morning. And a man who had not talked for a year, a fear came across his face that I saw and my oldest daughter saw.

447
00:43:15,170 --> 00:43:18,300
And she said to me, You're not going anywhere tonight, Mum. And I said, No, I'm not.

448
00:43:18,320 --> 00:43:21,920
I need to be here. My grandmother said, I need to be here with my father.

449
00:43:21,920 --> 00:43:31,190
I need to be here with him. And at that 3:00 in the morning, that dead of night, the rattle came into his breathing as his lungs filled up with fluid.

450
00:43:31,460 --> 00:43:39,050
And I was there with my father as he took his last breath, which for me was the biggest honour of anything that I could ever have been alive to do.

451
00:43:39,770 --> 00:43:44,660
And I've never had a fear of death. My grandmother made sure I never feared death.

452
00:43:44,960 --> 00:43:50,090
My father made sure that when that time comes for any of my family, I won't fear the death.

453
00:43:50,090 --> 00:43:58,220
All respect it, but I don't fear it. And there is, I think, in our society, a change towards death.

454
00:43:58,250 --> 00:44:02,540
The Victorians loved a good death. They celebrated a great death.

455
00:44:02,930 --> 00:44:10,910
And in my parents generation, Granny, when she died, was laid out in the front room, in the coffin, and everybody came to say goodbye.

456
00:44:11,420 --> 00:44:16,160
We've moved away from that. We've medicalized death and we've removed ourselves from it.

457
00:44:16,430 --> 00:44:20,600
And I think we'd be a lot healthier and a lot happier in that acceptance of death.

458
00:44:20,600 --> 00:44:30,620
We don't talk about it often enough, but when I see it and in my working world, then most of the time the really sad circumstances,

459
00:44:30,890 --> 00:44:37,580
the the aggressive circumstances and the piece of advice that was given to me by a

460
00:44:37,580 --> 00:44:42,530
senior officer was the only way to cope with this is to say you didn't cause it.

461
00:44:43,010 --> 00:44:46,399
You couldn't have stopped it. Don't own it. Don't own the guilt.

462
00:44:46,400 --> 00:44:55,730
It's not yours. Be a scientist. Find the evidence, recover the evidence, analyse the evidence, present the evidence, close the door and go home.

463
00:44:56,090 --> 00:44:59,120
That death isn't in your family. It's not yours.

464
00:44:59,360 --> 00:45:06,620
It's somebody else's. And you couldn't have stopped it. So don't allow yourself to become personally and emotionally involved.

465
00:45:06,620 --> 00:45:13,340
It doesn't mean that we're clinical, but if we have to do our job and families rely on us to do our job impartially,

466
00:45:13,700 --> 00:45:16,820
then we need to have that little bit of removal.

467
00:45:17,060 --> 00:45:24,620
And it's the same of any clinician. You have to have a little bit of removal of yourself from the situation that's going on around you.

468
00:45:25,400 --> 00:45:29,719
Thank you. Let's see if we have some questions in the room.

469
00:45:29,720 --> 00:45:33,110
Anybody who would like to ask, we have a microphone going around.

470
00:45:33,770 --> 00:45:40,260
So there's one at the back, I think maybe to. Nothing's out of bounds.

471
00:45:42,280 --> 00:45:44,440
Hello. Hi there. Thank you very much.

472
00:45:45,160 --> 00:45:54,430
I was wondering what you make of the use of forensic in DNA phenotyping, particularly in crime scene investigations and in physical reconstructions,

473
00:45:54,430 --> 00:45:58,659
particularly in light of lots of studies which suggest they've been mobilised for racial profiling

474
00:45:58,660 --> 00:46:03,400
in kind of criminal investigations in the US and increasingly in the European Union as well.

475
00:46:03,850 --> 00:46:12,580
So in terms of forensic phenotyping, what they mean by that for those in the room who might not know that's being able to take the DNA,

476
00:46:12,850 --> 00:46:19,000
is being able to extract information from the DNA that says, can I rebuild who this person might have been?

477
00:46:19,300 --> 00:46:22,300
Can I tell something about their ethnic origin, for example?

478
00:46:22,510 --> 00:46:26,950
Can I tell what colour of eyes they might have had? What colour of hair they may have had?

479
00:46:27,280 --> 00:46:34,270
Would I be able to reconstruct their face if I knew what the genetics were that were behind the basis of that face?

480
00:46:34,780 --> 00:46:40,420
So we have made huge leaps forward in terms of what we understand from DNA.

481
00:46:40,900 --> 00:46:45,610
And most of those initial leaps forward came from the world of medical genetics.

482
00:46:45,940 --> 00:46:49,480
It was about understanding the human and the variation the human.

483
00:46:50,110 --> 00:46:56,830
What the forensic world does, it's a bit of a magpie in that it goes and finds all the shiny things that everybody else does in science.

484
00:46:57,100 --> 00:47:05,080
And then we steal them and we try to then use them to answer some of the problems that we have and some of them we can answer quite well.

485
00:47:05,410 --> 00:47:10,630
So if we're able to get a full DNA profile, we might be of colour.

486
00:47:10,660 --> 00:47:16,660
Some of these eyes were. But what it doesn't do is it doesn't tell you what colour their contact lenses were that they might wear.

487
00:47:17,140 --> 00:47:20,800
So it might tell us what colour of hair they would have, naturally.

488
00:47:21,100 --> 00:47:27,460
But how many people in the room have the natural colour of hair that they perhaps their DNA was telling us about?

489
00:47:27,850 --> 00:47:34,870
So we have to do everything with that pinch of salt that says some information will be really useful to others.

490
00:47:35,050 --> 00:47:40,270
We have to be very careful. Can we reconstruct face reliably?

491
00:47:40,480 --> 00:47:44,680
Well, I would say not yet. But that doesn't mean that it won't happen.

492
00:47:44,980 --> 00:47:51,580
Science fiction has a wonderful habit of turning it into science fact because it's something that we can study.

493
00:47:52,150 --> 00:48:00,140
I think it becomes really challenging when we start to look at ancestry because we live in such an incredibly cosmopolitan world.

494
00:48:00,160 --> 00:48:04,450
What does it mean to belong to a particular group in this day and age?

495
00:48:04,720 --> 00:48:09,640
Probably very little because we have so much admixture and we move around the world and we have

496
00:48:09,640 --> 00:48:16,870
such a great amount of variation that it probably is definitive enough for us to be able to use.

497
00:48:17,080 --> 00:48:20,530
So I think it's a great idea. It's something wonderful to play with.

498
00:48:20,920 --> 00:48:24,940
But I have. Thank you.

499
00:48:24,980 --> 00:48:28,360
Another question. Come on.

500
00:48:28,390 --> 00:48:36,270
Anything? Yes, there's one here. It doesn't matter how silly you think it is, everybody else is thinking that.

501
00:48:38,490 --> 00:48:39,570
Thank you so much for this.

502
00:48:39,930 --> 00:48:47,760
I was wondering, it seems like in the past forensic careers were something you chose and you very much had a decision about.

503
00:48:47,940 --> 00:48:52,110
Do you want to see gruesome content in your life or not?

504
00:48:52,470 --> 00:49:00,150
And I think now you only have to open Twitter and you see images from Ukraine or, you know, any of the catastrophes around the world.

505
00:49:00,150 --> 00:49:03,809
And I wonder if your career in forensic anthropology, you think,

506
00:49:03,810 --> 00:49:09,120
has any lessons for the modern layperson who's just trying to navigate the Internet, for example?

507
00:49:09,570 --> 00:49:13,229
Yeah, there's a lot more that's available to us now than there ever was.

508
00:49:13,230 --> 00:49:21,480
And I at our freshers dinner at St John's, I talked about what it was like for me as pressure.

509
00:49:21,840 --> 00:49:31,649
And I had come from Inverness, which was a terribly sheltered background and my first exposure as a fresher in Aberdeen University.

510
00:49:31,650 --> 00:49:37,170
I wasn't that far away from Inverness. They ran a film and I was so shocked.

511
00:49:37,830 --> 00:49:42,810
I can remember to this day how shocked I was by the film that they showed.

512
00:49:43,140 --> 00:49:50,340
And it was the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I had never seen men in stockings and suspenders.

513
00:49:50,460 --> 00:49:52,470
It didn't happen in Inverness.

514
00:49:52,860 --> 00:50:03,900
So what was shocking to me back then is so mainstream now that there is no doubt we have a little bit of a desensitisation I think happens.

515
00:50:04,500 --> 00:50:08,490
But the desensitisation of what you see on the screen.

516
00:50:09,410 --> 00:50:12,770
Very to what you see when it's in front of you.

517
00:50:13,280 --> 00:50:18,950
I don't think that ever goes away. So it should be in the past.

518
00:50:19,190 --> 00:50:25,940
Forensic experts, they thought, you know, we're immune. There's never going to be anything we see that is going to affect us.

519
00:50:26,330 --> 00:50:32,420
And one of my dearest friends, Dick Sheppard, who's a forensic pathologist, wrote a book called Unnatural Causes.

520
00:50:32,690 --> 00:50:36,080
And Dick has done thousands of post-mortems in his life.

521
00:50:36,620 --> 00:50:39,080
And the bravest, one of the bravest men I know,

522
00:50:39,350 --> 00:50:48,499
he talked about being in a bar and he heard somebody drop ice cubes into a glass and he suddenly realised he was back in Bali following

523
00:50:48,500 --> 00:50:55,280
the Bali bombings and all the rows of bodies that were laid out that families had to go along and trying to find their loved one.

524
00:50:55,700 --> 00:51:01,399
And he said, I find myself going into a downward spiral and I couldn't get out of it.

525
00:51:01,400 --> 00:51:03,770
And he was suffering from post-traumatic stress.

526
00:51:04,460 --> 00:51:12,770
I have never known of any pathologist who has been brave enough to say, I'm just as susceptible to this as anybody else's,

527
00:51:13,010 --> 00:51:17,300
and we might think we're immune because we can see all these dreadful things on television.

528
00:51:17,720 --> 00:51:22,190
But when you're in the mortuary and you're faced with it, what you see,

529
00:51:22,400 --> 00:51:28,280
what you hear, what you smell, that it's so strong, the smell you can taste it.

530
00:51:28,640 --> 00:51:37,660
It never, ever leaves you. That's an assault on so many senses at the same time that you never, ever take that for granted.

531
00:51:37,910 --> 00:51:41,810
So you might see it. But the reality of it is something very, very different.

532
00:51:41,840 --> 00:51:46,550
Very. And we have to try and train our students to be able to cope with that.

533
00:51:47,000 --> 00:51:54,080
And we do it very gradually. So if I can take them through a dissecting room, I can use the dissecting room to talk to them about death.

534
00:51:54,410 --> 00:51:57,200
I can talk to them about muscle and bloods and bone.

535
00:51:57,410 --> 00:52:07,970
I can take them into a post mortem in a hospital where it's it's not a violent environment and we can start to get them more acclimatised towards it.

536
00:52:08,390 --> 00:52:15,380
But the first time I take them out on a case, I spend a lot of time talking to them about what it is that they're likely to see.

537
00:52:15,710 --> 00:52:22,670
I then talk about them to say it's okay for this to be difficult, but you need to talk about it afterwards.

538
00:52:22,880 --> 00:52:30,410
So I have a wingman and she knows me better than my husband does, and I've known my husband since I was 17 and she's my wingman.

539
00:52:30,410 --> 00:52:34,969
And she knows that if I start behaving differently, I drink more than I shoot.

540
00:52:34,970 --> 00:52:44,570
I'm not sleeping at night. She recognises there's a problem and I do the same for her and you need to have that person you would trust your life with.

541
00:52:45,200 --> 00:52:48,200
Who's going to watch out for your wellbeing and your mental health?

542
00:52:48,200 --> 00:52:53,420
Because if I don't look out for mine and hers, we can't do our job and we have to.

543
00:52:53,570 --> 00:52:59,810
So we really take what our students need to go through really seriously because we don't want to break them.

544
00:53:00,110 --> 00:53:06,440
We really don't. They're going to be modern day senators who are going to consume the sins of the rest of the world.

545
00:53:06,830 --> 00:53:15,050
And we're going to have to help them learn how to cope with that, because why would anybody ever want to do this for a living?

546
00:53:15,290 --> 00:53:20,540
It's ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous. Thank you.

547
00:53:21,330 --> 00:53:26,550
Helen had a question, I think. This is not right.

548
00:53:26,560 --> 00:53:30,750
So lawyers and judges. Yeah, I just it was respectful.

549
00:53:31,300 --> 00:53:40,629
It's it's a fair point. I know that you were talking about the Royal Society and the kind of guidance they've made for lawyers.

550
00:53:40,630 --> 00:53:51,790
But one of the things that I'm aware of is that lawyers are often very bad scientists or mathematicians, and people do get convicted, for example,

551
00:53:52,150 --> 00:54:00,430
in relation to sudden infant death because lawyers don't understand statistics properly, so they misdirect juries in a way that they don't understand.

552
00:54:00,430 --> 00:54:03,100
And presumably the same is true of DNA evidence.

553
00:54:03,790 --> 00:54:12,040
An expert who's sure of something could convince people without the lawyers necessarily understanding enough to unpack it.

554
00:54:12,040 --> 00:54:18,399
And I just wonder how, you know, you talked about the irrelevant sort of snide question of poor lawyer will.

555
00:54:18,400 --> 00:54:19,610
Right. Will last,

556
00:54:19,630 --> 00:54:28,280
but it is also a lawyer's job to make sure that all those questions have been asked and people can think about how much doubt there should be.

557
00:54:28,300 --> 00:54:34,600
How do you, I guess, train people to have to ask things and to have that appropriate and proper doubt?

558
00:54:34,780 --> 00:54:42,760
Often in courts, we will not have met the legal team before we're actually in the dock and that's not helpful.

559
00:54:43,280 --> 00:54:47,210
So. So being able to be in a position where at least you can talk to the.

560
00:54:48,040 --> 00:54:51,460
You can explore the extent of the evidence of the kind of questions you.

561
00:54:52,580 --> 00:54:55,570
It is the first time you meet them and you're standing in the box that.

562
00:54:57,830 --> 00:55:02,690
What we will we will try to do is, of course, we can only answer the questions for us.

563
00:55:03,290 --> 00:55:06,530
And if we're not asked the right question, we can still test.

564
00:55:07,280 --> 00:55:14,520
We actually have to own the. Sometimes we will we will get a lot of time with.

565
00:55:15,390 --> 00:55:20,780
That's where it's most. And certainly in an English court, you can sit in the courtroom.

566
00:55:21,110 --> 00:55:25,329
And so we can pass information to the. Instead that saying that's not quite true.

567
00:55:25,330 --> 00:55:28,730
You need to. In a Scottish culture. How to do that.

568
00:55:29,030 --> 00:55:35,430
You're not allowed into the. Any other time except to give you evidence so you don't know what's going on, right?

569
00:55:36,220 --> 00:55:39,340
So we have to be able to operate, first of all, in all the jurisdictions.

570
00:55:39,860 --> 00:55:43,180
The UK and they've all got a slightly different legal system.

571
00:55:43,940 --> 00:55:47,090
We might not be able to talk to them beforehand.

572
00:55:47,120 --> 00:55:53,000
All they have is your report to go. So your report needs to be as as informative.

573
00:55:55,510 --> 00:56:00,600
But often where we get the most of voice is when we'll sit down with the lawyers.

574
00:56:00,610 --> 00:56:04,930
Let's. To say, what kind of questions would you be asking me?

575
00:56:05,290 --> 00:56:09,370
And, you know, Donald is wonderful for that, because if you can understand.

576
00:56:11,420 --> 00:56:15,000
So in your evidence. And say, Well, I need to save this and this.

577
00:56:16,110 --> 00:56:20,420
Because that may. Teams are write up the right sort of.

578
00:56:22,030 --> 00:56:29,080
Where we try to help is in the primaries that are jointly from the Royal Society of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

579
00:56:29,380 --> 00:56:35,260
They have come together. To produce pieces of prose that are simple language.

580
00:56:35,490 --> 00:56:39,840
People who are not scientists. And mainly it's the judges to be able to.

581
00:56:40,890 --> 00:56:44,710
It's our job to train every lawyer to be a scientist. That's not their job.

582
00:56:45,280 --> 00:56:48,520
But as the judge notes, when we're looking at a particular evidence.

583
00:56:49,470 --> 00:56:53,460
This is the really solid ground of that evidence. Go for it.

584
00:56:53,470 --> 00:56:58,360
Ask the questions there. But when you get on to here, you know, the research isn't too strong.

585
00:56:58,720 --> 00:57:01,300
So if we're looking at DNA, being able to talk about.

586
00:57:01,940 --> 00:57:10,340
Some probability, then it's very solid ground until you start to talk about transfer persistence of DNA.

587
00:57:10,850 --> 00:57:15,860
So if you imagine you're in a bar and it's a loud bar to be heard, your chart,

588
00:57:16,280 --> 00:57:22,040
as you showed, your DNA is being spread around because it's being spread your saliva.

589
00:57:22,250 --> 00:57:30,420
Your DNA is landing on all the people around you. They go home and something happens at home and there is a scene.

590
00:57:30,990 --> 00:57:36,170
Your DNA is now at that crime scene. You were never there, but your DNA is there.

591
00:57:36,900 --> 00:57:40,020
If we detect such. We can because.

592
00:57:40,140 --> 00:57:44,100
You can detect DNA from single cells. What does that mean?

593
00:57:44,670 --> 00:57:47,250
Well, it's see evidence of your DNA at that point.

594
00:57:48,490 --> 00:57:56,370
Unfortunately for you, somewhere in your past, you've committed a crime and you're on a DNA database and we run it.

595
00:57:56,380 --> 00:58:00,730
We go to Europe. Jeff, you know, you've done a few naughty things in the past.

596
00:58:01,060 --> 00:58:04,670
Just so happens we've picked up your DNA. That has.

597
00:58:06,290 --> 00:58:18,079
We don't understand how DNA transfers and we don't understand how long it persists on a piece of woodland jumper or on a pretty or whatever it may be.

598
00:58:18,080 --> 00:58:22,920
We just don't know. So the lawyers need to understand how far.

599
00:58:24,660 --> 00:58:28,620
And beyond. That step is too far. Because we don't have.

600
00:58:31,370 --> 00:58:36,620
It's a very delicate scorpion dance that occurs in the courtroom around the friends of some of.

601
00:58:37,380 --> 00:58:41,460
And by enlarge the jury are bored out of their minds.

602
00:58:41,890 --> 00:58:49,150
In a courtroom, it's often not the most exciting place on the planet for a member of the public.

603
00:58:49,510 --> 00:58:54,450
And the last thing they want to hear is a statistician who comes in to talk about probability.

604
00:58:54,870 --> 00:58:58,410
A Bayes theorem because at that point it completely glazed over.

605
00:58:58,770 --> 00:59:02,190
But all of forensic sciences, they're sexy because I've seen them.

606
00:59:02,380 --> 00:59:11,840
Excellent. And often all we do is disappoint because we can't get the kinds of expectations that they might have that television has given them.

607
00:59:11,860 --> 00:59:17,910
So we're often a big disappoint. I think that was a fun quick.

608
00:59:17,920 --> 00:59:35,630
Yes, there was a question there. Is that, like, you know.

609
00:59:35,690 --> 00:59:45,560
Yeah. Helen mentioned your work with voting patterns and hands, and I believe you've also got a citizen science project on that.

610
00:59:46,340 --> 00:59:51,770
Um, I just wanted to ask about that and also how you cope with that particular area of work.

611
00:59:52,370 --> 00:59:56,630
So you've been doing your research. Thank you very much. Delighted.

612
00:59:56,900 --> 01:00:04,480
So back in 2006, the Metropolitan Police got in touch with me to take a case and it's been rattling around inside our department.

613
01:00:06,420 --> 01:00:09,450
It was a young girl who alleged that her father convinced.

614
01:00:11,180 --> 01:00:15,190
The sexual abuse of. And she told her mother and her brother.

615
01:00:17,410 --> 01:00:21,710
But the young girl did what? She left her camera on her computer running at night.

616
01:00:22,210 --> 01:00:25,200
She put her camera on to record.

617
01:00:29,280 --> 01:00:37,640
And at 4:30 in the morning, what we see is a hands and a forearm coming into view of her camera, doing exactly what she said was her.

618
01:00:39,210 --> 01:00:42,810
If you leave your camera running at night, it slips into your room for a.

619
01:00:43,850 --> 01:00:47,570
And you can see in the dark and near-infrared lights by this.

620
01:00:48,260 --> 01:00:57,560
Closer to human skin. It acts, it interacts with the deoxygenated blood in your veins, and you can see your vein pattern sloughing blood timelines.

621
01:00:57,890 --> 01:01:02,110
So we have these tramline pattern of veins. For the hands of a.

622
01:01:04,390 --> 01:01:08,380
She took her video to the police and said, this is all my fault.

623
01:01:09,550 --> 01:01:12,850
So police came to us and said, What? Can you do it? No idea.

624
01:01:13,120 --> 01:01:19,600
I'm a forensic anthropologist. I deal with dead bodies. I don't deal with rape concerns in child sexual abuse cases.

625
01:01:20,110 --> 01:01:23,530
And they said, but to me. That's true.

626
01:01:23,570 --> 01:01:27,060
And in anatomy, we know that veins are variable.

627
01:01:27,420 --> 01:01:35,090
So I guarantee to you this is a dangerous thing. But I guarantee you that the pattern of veins on the back of your right hand.

628
01:01:35,740 --> 01:01:38,920
A difference of a positive change on the back of your last time.

629
01:01:39,620 --> 01:01:45,380
I guarantee you, if you're an identical twin, they will be completely different between you and your identical twin.

630
01:01:45,950 --> 01:01:48,800
They won't be the same as your mom or your dad's or anybody.

631
01:01:49,560 --> 01:01:55,930
Is that being pattern as laid down in your features inside your mouth and it's laid out in response to the.

632
01:01:57,570 --> 01:02:04,290
Tensions around you in that environment. So what I said is from the times of the salience of the 1500s.

633
01:02:04,470 --> 01:02:13,209
And before we've known about variation. And there's no value that has a firm name in the human hands below the level of the elbow,

634
01:02:13,210 --> 01:02:18,060
because everything down there is so utterly, ridiculously variable that there's nothing holding.

635
01:02:18,750 --> 01:02:22,870
And I said, what I can guarantee is if we if we do a pattern of very much.

636
01:02:23,320 --> 01:02:28,870
Between the offender and the suspect. If they don't match, it's not him.

637
01:02:29,320 --> 01:02:35,530
Because you're being so changed. You don't grow in your brain. But if they match.

638
01:02:36,060 --> 01:02:41,350
I don't know what that means. And the police said, that's okay, let's do it.

639
01:02:41,360 --> 01:02:44,850
Because they said if we could exclude that, that will help us move.

640
01:02:45,680 --> 01:02:49,820
I think that's perfectly between the veins on the perpetrator and the veins of.

641
01:02:50,470 --> 01:02:55,900
She said. And so we went. The case went to the Crown Prosecution Service.

642
01:02:56,530 --> 01:03:01,720
The Crown Prosecution Service said, we're going to take a punt. We're going to take this into court and see what happens.

643
01:03:02,050 --> 01:03:06,580
Which is the worst thing that a scientist wants to hear is going to be had our team court.

644
01:03:07,280 --> 01:03:14,190
And the judge called a volunteer so that the jury went away and he decided on the basis of anatomical knowledge.

645
01:03:14,820 --> 01:03:19,810
If he was alive. The evidence. It is the first time that evidence of ongoing concern amongst.

646
01:03:20,610 --> 01:03:24,290
I've been hired. We gave our evidence.

647
01:03:24,920 --> 01:03:29,270
The jury went away. The jury came back and they found not guilty.

648
01:03:30,150 --> 01:03:33,450
And at that point, you take the responsibility.

649
01:03:33,450 --> 01:03:41,040
And I said to our buyers, Sir, what did we do wrong? What are we not able to explain just how variable they.

650
01:03:43,560 --> 01:03:47,790
And the lawyer said to us, and I'll never forget that, she said, you know, I don't think you did anything wrong.

651
01:03:48,030 --> 01:03:52,110
I think your evidence is. They didn't believe the girl. She didn't cry.

652
01:03:52,410 --> 01:03:58,510
She didn't break time. And then finally, the teenage girl who'd been brave enough.

653
01:03:59,500 --> 01:04:03,880
To accuse her father. To record the abuse, to show that it was.

654
01:04:05,010 --> 01:04:08,880
To take that evidence to the police and to go through a court.

655
01:04:09,680 --> 01:04:13,010
And I fought for a court to decide on the basis of the.

656
01:04:14,590 --> 01:04:19,310
And science needs to do the research. And that was what kicked off our research project.

657
01:04:19,330 --> 01:04:28,120
We needed to be able to go into a courtroom the next time and say, this is a one in a 500 chance or one in the thousands, a one in a million chance.

658
01:04:28,420 --> 01:04:31,659
That's where the research needed to be. A very lucky for me.

659
01:04:31,660 --> 01:04:40,120
At the time, I was training police officers. And so I had 500 police officers going through my department and to a man and a woman, bless them.

660
01:04:40,420 --> 01:04:48,140
They agreed to strip down to their underwear to allow me to photograph their hands on their forearms to their feet,

661
01:04:48,190 --> 01:04:53,229
their legs and their thighs, to look at the same pattern variation to look at skin pattern.

662
01:04:53,230 --> 01:04:58,240
Variation to be able to set the database. And that was where we started the work.

663
01:04:58,810 --> 01:05:01,810
The Citizen Research Project is occurring at the moment.

664
01:05:02,680 --> 01:05:07,310
Computers through A.I. To do our job. We want to be able to.

665
01:05:08,020 --> 01:05:12,500
Computers to say in this video of child abuse. We have struck the house.

666
01:05:13,150 --> 01:05:18,379
If I struck the hands, could I have struck the vein pattern? Can I abstract the muscle crease patterns?

667
01:05:18,380 --> 01:05:23,090
So if you look at the parts of the skin, pieces of your knuckles that difference on everything, you're them different.

668
01:05:24,480 --> 01:05:27,720
If you're a redhead, get a Franco costume. It's. It's unique. It's yours.

669
01:05:27,930 --> 01:05:32,250
No one else is going to have your. Your Franco pantsuit. If you're a redhead, it's just not going to happen.

670
01:05:32,490 --> 01:05:36,060
I have three redhead children. None of their freckle patterns are the same.

671
01:05:36,600 --> 01:05:38,020
So all of these features.

672
01:05:41,130 --> 01:05:49,320
To be able to find the research team are so mean to me that they have to be one day to say, we just trained to do the computer.

673
01:05:50,060 --> 01:05:56,450
To do something and they find something you missed so that they thought that's never going to happen.

674
01:05:56,450 --> 01:06:03,409
I knew that. But that's exactly what they have. We have now got to a position where the computer is picking up a very concern.

675
01:06:03,410 --> 01:06:07,090
But I. I think that's our way forward.

676
01:06:07,610 --> 01:06:13,380
Is that we can now look. Millions of. Using algorithms to obstruct the.

677
01:06:14,330 --> 01:06:23,570
And we can now connect to. So if you want to send us photographs of your hands, wonderful segway for you.

678
01:06:24,620 --> 01:06:29,629
If you look closer, actually, you'll see it's through Lancaster University and it's working jointly.

679
01:06:29,630 --> 01:06:33,020
It's on the university as well. So that it's unique project.

680
01:06:33,020 --> 01:06:38,089
We're asking the public, Just photograph your hands. We strip off all the data so it's not your data.

681
01:06:38,090 --> 01:06:42,480
We'll never be able to link it back to you. It allows us to look at variation.

682
01:06:42,870 --> 01:06:49,970
That's where we create the algorithm. We then destroyed the images and the algorithms that we then use in.

683
01:06:51,620 --> 01:06:59,620
To be able to say this. Individualism. No child sex. Can we find their hands in the millions of.

684
01:07:00,220 --> 01:07:03,740
That are held by Interpol. And that's the way that our.

685
01:07:07,130 --> 01:07:11,180
That's wonderful. We'll see. Thank you so much indeed for for sharing with us.

686
01:07:11,180 --> 01:07:18,680
Before we we thank Sue, I would like to say if you if you want to read more about this, her books,

687
01:07:18,680 --> 01:07:23,680
All That Matters and written in bone absolutely beautifully written that sort of thing.

688
01:07:24,020 --> 01:07:28,340
It places hilarious in places and inspiring throughout to absolutely wonderful.

689
01:07:29,210 --> 01:07:32,210
Before we close, Helen is going to just say a few words.

690
01:07:32,690 --> 01:07:35,450
Well, and I'm sure you'll want to thank Sue.

691
01:07:35,450 --> 01:07:44,029
That was enthralling and I think brought together a lot of questions about doubt and law and rights and police and science.

692
01:07:44,030 --> 01:07:53,180
And I and it was wonderful. I suspect we may need to teach some jurors a little bit more about psychology and teen psychology, but there we are.

693
01:07:53,750 --> 01:07:59,569
So I don't think it's your fault. But just before we thank Sue, I just want to let you know that next week's lecture,

694
01:07:59,570 --> 01:08:04,850
which is an open trot lecture or annual lecture in memory of Adam von Trotta,

695
01:08:04,850 --> 01:08:13,340
who was an alumnus here and was hanged in the Fifth for trying to bring down Hitler.

696
01:08:14,900 --> 01:08:20,720
So we have an annual lecture memory of him, and this year it's going to be Hartwig Fisher, who's the director of the British Museum,

697
01:08:21,470 --> 01:08:28,820
talking about deep in history and the world of Stonehenge and a completely different kind of detective work.

698
01:08:28,820 --> 01:08:33,320
So do come along or tell people who might be interested. And that's half as five next week.

699
01:08:33,320 --> 01:08:37,130
But. Yes. Thank you very much, Sarah. Steve and I can thank you together.