I just read this article from the Forensic News blog:

I recently saw a series of segments on a news show questioning forensic science. After examining several areas of forensic science and questioning their validity, they made a statement that DNA evidence seems to be the only truly accurate evidence to link a person to a crime scene. According to a recent New York Times article, that may not be the case anymore. Scientists in Israel were able to fabricate blood and saliva samples with DNA from a person other than the donor.

The authors of the paper took blood from a woman and centrifuged it to remove the white cells, which contain DNA. To the remaining red cells they added DNA that had been amplified from a man’s hair. Since red cells do not contain DNA, all of the genetic material in the blood sample was from the man. The authors sent it to a leading American forensics laboratory, which analyzed it as if it were a normal sample of a man’s blood.

Obviously a person attempting to fake and plant DNA evidence would need a background in biology and DNA analysis techniques to pull this off. I think it’s safe to say your average criminal won’t be able to have access to the necessary equipment and the knowledge to do this, but it is an interesting new study.

It’s a little unsettling to hear that it’s possible to create fake DNA evidence, but I don’t necessarily think that should cause us to lose our faith in DNA. Maybe knowing this, precautionary measures should be taken. Making sure the labs that conduct the procedures don’t know the genetic donors, or perhaps not giving them information about the donors at all. Each donor could be given a number or letter (i.e. Donor 1, Donor A), making it impossible for the lab technicians to have any personal interest in the matter.

It’s possible that we may never find a fail-proof method of identification, but DNA is the closest to that we have. The real issue in finding reliable forensic evidence are the humans behind it.

Related posts:

1. What if DNA evidence from a crime scene could tell us what the perpetrator looked like? That question is the taken from a new post over at the Change.org Criminal Justice blog. The post is inspired...
2. DNA evidence useless in Jovin murder case That was the title of the article from the Yale Daily News yesterday about the 1998 murder of a Yale...
3. Mississippi required to keep DNA evidence In March, a Mississippi law went into effect requiring DNA evidence from criminal cases to be preserved. However, neither crime...
4. Memory as unreliable evidence Somewhat in line with yesterday’s post on junk science, I thought I’d share this article on the reliability (or unreliability,...
5. Reactions to the NAS Report: Roundup We blogged earlier about the National Academy of Sciences report eviscerating the nation’s forensic laboratories and the way scientific testimony...
6. The myths behind forensic science Popular Mechanics has published an article in their August 2009 issue on faulty forensics and its role in wrongful convictions....