“THIS MAN IS MAD!”
I gave a talk last night to Dr. Tali Walters’ class on forensic psychology at Tufts University. Dr. Walters is an eminent forensic psychologist who has interviewed some of the most notorious serial killers of our time. She asked me to describe Joseph Vacher, the villain in my book, talk about his crimes and see…
Read MoreThe Myth of CSI
The Controversy about whether the state’s chief medical examiner falsified his credentials puts one more crack in our national myth about crime scene investigations. That myth, created by the CSI shows that have been a staple of TV for the past decade, portray crime labs as models of ultra-modern efficiency, where dedicated investigators use stateof-the-art…
Read MoreFIVE CRIME-RELATED HOT-BUTTON ISSUES IN THE 1890s THAT ARE STILL HOT TODAY
The forensic pioneers in The Killer of Little Shepherds confronted issues that could easily have jumped from today’s headlines: 1) CONFESSIONS BY TORTURE: The first generation of modern criminologists, in the 1880’s and 90’s studied interrogation techniques, and found that torture was useless. Hans Gross, the great Austrian criminologist, wrote that people subjected to torture…
Read MoreMORE CSI CONTROVERSY
My hometown newspaper The Boston Globe reports on a controversy over possible resume-fudging at the state medical examiner’s office. Sadly, this isn’t first first allegation of wrongdoing at the state lab. Last year Ulysses Rodriguez Charles was freed and awarded $3.25 million in damages after spending 18 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of…
Read MoreCSI GONE ROGUE
In my previous posting I wrote about CSI labs that produced wrongful convictions because of sloppy procedures, outdated equipment and an unconscious bias toward the police. There’s a subset of these cases, though: Investigators who produced results so outrageously wrong that they appear to have done so on purpose – in essence, framing the accused.…
Read MoreCSI GONE WRONG
We all know that the CSI television shows bear little resemblance to reality. Real-life medical examiners don’t go into the field, don’t confront and intimidate suspects, don’t comfort grieving relatives, don’t carry guns…and don’t wear designer clothes to the office. They don’t wrap up their cases in an hour. And they don’t solve every case.…
Read More$1,000 for Your Genome?
Imagine if doctors could tell you what diseases you’re most susceptible to before you get sick—and if scientists could create medicines to fit your personal genetics. George Church sees that day dawning. When scientists sequenced the human genome in 2003, George Church let everyone else sing their praises. He was as thrilled as any other…
Read MoreWhen Surgeon Leave Medical Instruments in Patients
DR. ATUL GAWANDE IS conducting a simulated thyroid removal at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The operation is a bloody procedure. It involves about 100 instruments and dozens of surgical sponges, small gauzelike pads used for sopping up blood. Each time Gawande asks for more sponges, the nurses count them aloud before handing them over—the standard…
Read MoreThe Cuban Biotech Revolution
The end of the cold war was cruel to Cuba. The country’s trading partners, denied Soviet largesse, dried up. Hard cash ran low. What food the country could grow languished in the fields; trucks didn’t have enough gasoline to bring the crops to market. And of course there was the US embargo. What Cubans call “the…
Read MoreSenseless Crackdown on Cuba
While America was watching the images of abused Iraqi prisoners, I saw the same images from my hotel room in another country slated for regime change: Cuba. I’d gone there to do research on that nation’s biotech industry. During the week I spent there I learned more about my own country than I’d expected —…
Read More