DNA fingerprinting on trial: the dramatic early history of a new forensic technique

The early history of "DNA fingerprinting" in the UK might have been different were it not for the accounts of two dramatic courtroom trials, made by the participants and the media, in the mid-1980s. But these reports, which misrepresented the importance DNA evidence had in the trials, left a strong impression on the British public and on judges on both sides of the Atlantic. These trials, widely considered to be the first "victories" for DNA fingerprinting, have been frequently cited as proof of the utility and reliability of the technique, in both the UK and beyond. But in reality, it was the threat of DNA evidence being used rather than the integrity or validity of it that resolved these cases. At that time, DNA fingerprinting was still in its infancy, an untried and untested technology.     

模拟现场在本科法医物证学实践教学中的应用

法医物证学是法医学一门重要的分支应用性学科。随着社会的进步和专业技术的发展,传统法医物证教学培养的人才已不能满足公检法及社会鉴定机构的需求。培养理论基础扎实、综合分析并解决问题能力更强的法医学专业人才,已成为当前法医学教学的重点。实验教学是法医学人才实践能力培养的核心环节。我校法医物证教研室通过与公安机关合作,将模拟刑事案件现场用于法医物证的实践教学中,构建综合性实验教学体系,让学生运用所学专业知识,完成现场勘验,现场生物检材的发现、提取、包装、保存和送检以及实验室检测、出具鉴定报告等,勇于打破专业课间的界限,加强关联学科知识的学习等实验教学体系的改革,取得了较好的教学效果。     

Beware! Uncle Sam has Your DNA: Legal Fallout from its Use and Misuse in the U.S.

Technology has provided state and federal governments with huge collections of DNA samples and identifying profiles stored in databanks. That information can be used to solve crimes by matching samples from convicted felons to unsolved crimes, and has aided law enforcement in investigating and convicting suspects, and exonerating innocent felons, even after lengthy incarceration. Rights surrounding the provision of DNA samples, however, remain unclear in light of the constitutional guarantee against "unreasonable searches and seizures" and privacy concerns. The courts have just begun to consider this issue, and have provided little guidance. It is unclear whether the laws governing protected health information are applicable to the instant situation, and if so, the degree to which they apply. DNA databanks are not uniformly regulated, and it is possible that DNA samples contained in them may be used for purposes unintended by donors of the samples. As people live their lives, they leave bits of their DNA behind. They cannot be assured that these tiny specimens will not be taken or used against their will or without their knowledge for activities such as profiling to measure tendencies such as thrill-seeking, aggressiveness, or crimes with threatening behavior. Existing racial or ethnic discrimination and profiling may also encompass genetic discrimination and profiling, creating societal class distinctions. This article will explore the constitutionality of collecting genetic materials, the ethics of such activities, and balance the social good in solving crime and deterrence against the individual's security, liberty, and privacy.     

Popular press and forensic genetics in Portugal: expectations and disappointments regarding two cases of missing children

Two cases of missing children in Portugal (Joana and Maddie) have recently highlighted the dilemmas and contingencies associated with the technology of "genetic fingerprinting" for forensic purposes in the context of criminal investigations. The purpose of this article is to analyze the popular press's discourses and representations around forensic genetics in the context of those two highly mediatized criminal investigation cases. The symbolical construction and representation of forensic genetics by the media presents a form of public exposure to beliefs on forensic genetics' characteristics and potential. These are blended with popular cultural contexts that are constructed with reference to images of a super-science which may carry consequences in the public understanding of forensic science. The media coverage of both cases and their actual disclosure resembles the patterns ofa CSI effect, insofar as real science's capabilities and limitations are placed against fictionalized representations of forensic science.     

337调查下的企业专利诉讼策略博弈分析

337调查是美国对我国企业建立贸易壁垒的重要手段,一旦企业被签发制止令和排除令则会丢失其美国市场。本文根据337调查的特点,构建了中美企业间的三阶段动态博弈模型,从成本收益视角分析了影响双方和解的因素。模型结论表明,被申请人的和解概率与其检索无效证据的概率、申请人的胜诉概率以及申请人由于被申请人损失的美国市场份额成正比,与申请人的花费以及要求的许可费成反比;申请人的和解概率与被申请人检索无效证据的成本成正比。文章以我国LED行业遭遇的两次337调查作为案例进行对比分析,验证了结论的有效性。最后,基于模型结论,本文从企业的视角出发,提出了应对337调查的建议。     

Science and statistical victim: modernizing knowledge in breast implant litigation

The advent of mass torts in US federal courts in the latter third of the 20th century accelerated a process of modernization in an institution that was unprepared for standardized approaches to dispute resolution. Faced with large-scale technological disasters, in particular, courts struggled to reform both their procedures and their fact-finding approaches in order to deal with multiple claimants in consolidated proceedings. Using silicone gel breast implant litigation as a case study, this paper argues that the attempt to marry judicial concerns for individual justice with administrative concerns for speed, efficiency and economy has produced anomalous results. The testimony of the clinician and the victim has become less relevant as judicial remedies take account of injuries done to classes of plaintiffs. Subjective claims about the body are subordinated to statistical correlations between exposure and grouped complaints. At the same time, the transfer of fact-finding authority from juries to judges under new evidentiary rules has privileged the judiciary's lay knowledge and experience over that of the jury. While these transformations may hasten the processing of cases, the paper questions whether the courts can legitimately take on board the issues of risk and social justice in contemporary industrial societies.     

Law machines: scale models, forensic materiality and the making of modern patent law

Early US patent law was machine made. Before the Patent Office took on the function of examining patent applications in 1836, questions of novelty and priority were determined in court, within the forum of the infringement action. And at all levels of litigation, from the circuit courts up to the Supreme Court, working models were the media through which doctrine, evidence and argument were made legible, communicated and interpreted. A model could be set on a table, pointed at, picked up, rotated or upended so as to display a point of interest to a particular audience within the courtroom, and, crucially, set in motion to reveal the 'mode of operation' of a machine. The immediate object of demonstration was to distinguish the intangible invention from its tangible embodiment, but models also'machined' patent law itself. Demonstrations of patent claims with models articulated and resolved a set of conceptual tensions that still make the definition and apprehension of the invention difficult, even today, but they resolved these tensions in the register of materiality, performativity and visibility, rather than the register of conceptuality. The story of models tells us something about how inventions emerge and subsist within the context of patent litigation and patent doctrine, and it offers a starting point for renewed reflection on the question of how technology becomes property.     

Investigating CSI: portrayals of DNA testing on a forensic crime show and their potential effects

The popularity of forensic crime shows such as CSI has fueled debate about their potential social impact. This study considers CSI's potential effects on public understandings regarding DNA testing in the context of judicial processes, the policy debates surrounding crime laboratory procedures, and the forensic science profession, as well as an effect not discussed in previous accounts: namely, the show's potential impact on public understandings of DNA and genetics more generally. To develop a theoretical foundation for research on the "CSI effect," it draws on cultivation theory, social cognitive theory, and audience reception studies. It then uses content analysis and textual analysis to illuminate how the show depicts DNA testing. The results demonstrate that CSI tends to depict DNA testing as routine, swift, useful, and reliable and that it echoes broader discourses about genetics. At times, however, the show suggests more complex ways of thinking about DNA testing and genetics.     

Tran-Switch: A transfer learning approach for sentence level cross-genre author profiling on code-switched English–RomanUrdu Text

Cross-genre author profiling aims to build generalized models for predicting profile traits of authors that can be helpful across different text genres for computer forensics, marketing, and other applications. The cross-genre author profiling task becomes challenging when dealing with low-resourced languages due to the lack of availability of standard corpora and methods. The task becomes even more challenging when the data is code-switched, which is informal and unstructured. In previous studies, the problem of cross-genre author profiling has been mainly explored for mono-lingual texts in highly resourced languages (English, Spanish, etc.). However, it has not been thoroughly explored for the code-switched text which is widely used for communication over social media. To fulfill this gap, we propose a transfer learning-based solution for the cross-genre author profiling task on code-switched (English–RomanUrdu) text using three widely known genres, Facebook comments/posts, Tweets, and SMS messages. In this article, firstly, we experimented with the traditional machine learning, deep learning and pre-trained transfer learning models (MBERT, XLMRoBERTa, ULMFiT, and XLNET) for the same-genre and cross-genre gender identification task. We then propose a novel Trans-Switch approach that focuses on the code-switching nature of the text and trains on specialized language models. In addition, we developed three RomanUrdu to English translated corpora to study the impact of translation on author profiling tasks. The results show that the proposed Trans-Switch model outperforms the baseline deep learning and pre-trained transfer learning models for cross-genre author profiling task on code-switched text. Further, the experimentation also shows that the translation of RomanUrdu text does not improve results.     

Credibility battles in the autism litigation

That vaccines do not cause autism is now a widely accepted proposition, though a few dissenters remain. An 8-year court process in the US federal vaccine injury compensation court ended in 2010 with rulings that autism was not an adverse reaction to vaccination. There were two sets of trials: one against the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and one against the mercury-based preservative thimerosal. The MMR story is more widely known because of publicity surrounding the main proponent of an MMR-autism link, British doctor Andrew Wakefield, but the story of thimerosal in court is largely untold. This study examines the credibility battles and boundary work in the two cases, illuminating the sustaining world of alternative science that supported the parents, lawyers, researchers, and expert witnesses against vaccines. After the loss in court, the families and their advocates transformed their scientific arguments into an indictment of procedural injustice in the vaccine court. I argue that the very efforts designed to produce legitimacy in this type of lopsided dispute will be counter-mobilized as evidence of injustice, helping us understand why settling a scientific controversy in court does not necessarily mean changing anyone's mind.     

Helping with inquiries or helping with profits? The trials and tribulations of a technology of forensic reasoning

The commercialization of forensic scientific provision in the UK over the last two decades has had a major role in shaping a changing epistemic identity for forensic scientists working within this jurisdiction. Efforts to match the presumed epistemological standards of the 'pure' sciences have been brought together with concerns about value for money in a new approach to the interpretation of evidence, an activity that lies at the heart of criminal investigative practice. A study of the Case Assessment and Interpretation method developed by members of the UK Forensic Science Service is used to show how a technical innovation in the delivery of forensic science services to the police has instantiated these two recent social processes.     

法庭科学领域科研伦理建设

法庭科学作为特殊的应用性科学,其研究和应用中时有涉及伦理问题,但目前中国尚缺乏法庭科学中科研伦理和行为规范问题的研究,相关伦理审查机构和审查规章仍是空白。从当前法庭科学科研伦理实践出发,针对职业伦理规范建设不足、科研伦理监管缺位以及法庭科学职业特色与伦理要求的冲突进行分析,为法庭科学研究科研伦理管理提出可参考的建议。     

The productivity of research effort in the US pharmaceutical industry: a statistical approach

The relationship between the organizational size and the research productivity of major US pharmaceutical firms was examined. The measure of organizational size was the research budget in dollars, and the measure of research production was the number of drugs introduced during hte 1960's judged be “important therapeutic advances” by a Food and Drug Administration study. Productivity, as distinct from production, was defined as research production per unit of R&D money spent. The conclusions are that research production appears to increase linearly with research budget. There seems to be no linear relationship between productivity and size, but quadratic techniques do give some evidence fro economies of scale in productivity.     

Managing academic freedom: recent cross-Atlantic developments

This paper charts the legal and institutional status of academic freedom in America after Garcetti v. Ceballos, a key First Amendment case decided by the US Supreme Court in 2006. It also addresses, in comparative compass, academic speech protection in the UK and the EU more broadly. Although a managerial ethos of university governance has reshaped academic freedom on both sides of the Atlantic, the shaping process has not been uniform. Differences in policy formation and institutional structure have produced significant variations in the safeguarding of faculty speech. Policy groups on the Continent have been particularly active in drafting aspirational statements on academic freedom. Both the UK and the EU also have legislation outlining the rights and responsibilities of university teaching and research. No such legislation exists in the US, where the courts have played a central role in determining the legal status of academic speech. Statutory provisions in Europe, by contrast, remain judicially untested. It is anticipated that academic freedom on both sides of the Atlantic will increasingly be defined in contract, with varying degrees of third-party appeal.     

Measurements of DNA barcode label separations in nanochannels from time-series data

We analyzed time-series data for fluctuations of intramolecular segments of barcoded E. coli genomic DNA molecules confined in nanochannels with sizes near the persistence length of DNA. These dynamic data allowed us to measure the probability distribution governing the distance between labels on the DNA backbone, which is a key input into the alignment methods used for genome mapping in nanochannels. Importantly, this dynamic method does not require alignment of the barcode to the reference genome, thereby removing a source of potential systematic error in a previous study of this type. The results thus obtained support previous evidence for a left-skewed probability density for the distance between labels, albeit at a lower magnitude of skewness. We further show that the majority of large fluctuations between labels are short-lived events, which sheds further light upon the success of the linearized DNA genome mapping technique. This time-resolved data analysis will improve existing genome map alignment algorithms, and the overall idea of using dynamic data could potentially improve the accuracy of genome mapping, especially for complex heterogeneous samples such as cancer cells.     

北京市司法鉴定实践运行状况研究

在现代司法活动中,鉴定是查明和证明案件事实的重要途径和手段,司法鉴定意见在审判中的作用也越来越重要。完善司法鉴定不仅是科学证据时代的呼唤,更是防止冤假错案产生,推动司法制度进化和改革的重要路径。本文以2014年北京市司法鉴定投诉为研究样本,统计了当前司法鉴定行业情况及投诉情况,分析了司法鉴定实践中所存在的实体问题、程序问题、管理问题,并提出了完善建议。     

DNA translocation through short nanofluidic channels under asymmetric pulsed electric field

Investigation of single molecule DNA dynamics in confined environments has led to important applications in DNA analysis, separation, and sequencing. Here, we studied the electrophoretic transport of DNA molecules through nanochannels shorter than the DNA contour length and calculated the associated translocation time curves. We found that the longer T4 DNA molecules required a longer time to traverse a fixed length nanochannel than shorter λ DNA molecules and that the translocation time decreased with increasing electric field which agreed with theoretical predictions. We applied this knowledge to design an asymmetric electric pulse and demonstrate the different responses of λ and T4 DNA to the pulses. We used Brownian dynamics simulations to corroborate our experimental results on DNA translocation behaviour. This work contributes to the fundamental understanding of polymer transport through nanochannels and may help in designing better separation techniques in the future.     

Information Economics and Policy in the United States by Michael R. Rubin, (Libraries Unlimited,Littleton, Colorado,USA, 1983), pp. xiv + 335, $US35.00. ISBN: 0-87287-378-1

Great progress in the field of recombinant DNA technology has masked concern about the safety of the procedures involved. It seems that those carrying out oncogene research using these techniques may be exposed to considerable danger of contracting cancer. A thorough program to assess the risks involved is required to replace the complacency of ignorance which now exist, and it is required before rather than after damage is done.     

Does it matter where patent citations come from? Inventor vs. examiner citations in European patents

This paper addresses the question of whether patent citations are useful indicators of technology flows. We exploit the distinction between citations added by inventors and patent examiners. We use information from the search reports of European Patent Office patent examiners to construct our dataset of patenting activity in Europe and the US, and apply various econometric models to investigate what determines the probability that a citation is added by the inventor rather than the examiner. Contrary to previous work which uses US Patent and Trademark Office data, we find that geographical distance is a factor that strongly diminishes the probability of knowledge flows. We find other significant effects of such factors as cognitive distance, time and strategic factors on citing behaviour.