Reactions

Telling picture

Featured prominently on the right side of a full-page ad for “Heroes in Chemistry” in the Oct. 14 issue of Science is a woman wearing safety goggles. I immediately wondered which awardee she was. Reading through the list of honorees, I found a single woman out of 18 honorees. Last year, there were two out of 13 recipients. The year before that, three of 17 total awardees were women. The conclusion: The award and the advertisement are meant to capture the attention of an overwhelmingly male audience. Women are pictured but not honored in nearly the numbers that their employment in the life sciences would suggest. Sigh; it's still an old boys' club.

Leanna M. Levine
Redondo Beach, Calif.

Fighting forforensic science

David C. Collins (C&EN, Sept. 5,page 6) and Wayne Moorehead (C&EN, July 25, page 5) commented on the issue of who is qualified to teach “criminalistics.” As a retired forensic scientist and current criminalistics educator, I'd like to add my two cents.

Crime laboratory directors have consistently emphasized the need for hard-science degrees for jobs in full-service crime labs. Until recently, graduates of forensic science programs had no advantage over chemistry graduates unless their particular program had an established reputation for providing well-educated scientists/chemists who also had exposure to forensic science. Concerns about the quality of forensic science programs resulted in the National Institute of Justice sponsoring the Technical Working Group for Education & Training in Forensic Science (TWGED), which developed “Education and Training in Forensic Science: A Guide for Forensic Science Laboratories, Educational Institutions, and Students” (June 2004). The results of this effort led to the formation of the Forensic Science Education Programs Accreditation Commission (FEPAC) by the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS).

Collins is correct in his assertions about criminalistics being dependent on many experts in chemistry, physics, biology, and so on, and these topics are appropriately taught by Ph.D.s in these subjects. As Collins points out, most chemistry professors have never worked in an industrial laboratory or chemical plant. But they have received extensive postgraduate education in their specialty. The Ph.D. chemist who has no experience in forensic science also has no education in forensic science. There are very few scientists with terminal degrees in forensic science or criminalistics. TWGED and FEPAC insist that appropriately educated chemists, biologists, and physicists teach these core courses and that the universities they teach in be appropriately accredited. They also require that the program director be a forensic scientist.

What makes a program a forensic science program? What is the difference between a criminalist/forensic scientist and a chemist or biologist? If an institution wants to identify a program as teaching forensic science or criminalistics, it is imperative that the program has someone who, through experience or education, is qualified to answer and elaborate upon these crucial questions. The analytical chemistry needed to compare the elemental composition of two pieces of glass is the same as the analytical chemistry for quality control in a glass factory. The interpretation of the results, though, will be markedly different.

Merely having worked as a criminalist will not qualify an instructor to educate a new generation of criminalists either. Forensic science programs need well-educated scientists who not only have education or experience in forensic science but who also have made it a point to keep up with the literature in related fields and in forensic science. We need people who have been active in AAFS and the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors and who have struggled with issues of bias, quality control, situation ethics, and other topics specific to the specialty.

I hope funding will become available for graduate programs with connections to forensic science so that more Ph.D. chemists, geochemists, and molecular biologists with some education in forensic science will become available to lead programs in our universities.

Charles G. Tindall
Denver

Waste not, want not

Two items in the Aug. 15 issue of C&EN, when taken together, provide interesting food for thought. The first is yet one more story about the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository (page 8). Apparently, Nevada's elected officials have rejected a radiation standard for nearby residents of 15 millirems annually for the repository's first 10,000 years and a higher dose limit of 350 millirems (normal background levels) thereafter. It is safe to assume that the officials are playing to real public concerns.

In spite of all the material and cultural progress made by humans over the past two millennia or so, we seem as a species to have a defect that may eventually prove fatal: an inability to think in terms of a progressive future and to incorporate that vision into our present lives. Think of the changes in the material condition of society over just the past 1,000 years. Human life has been transformed for the better in countless ways. Do we not believe that material progress will continue? Unless society completely tanks in some way, is it even remotely possible that human society will still be acquiring its drinking water in the same way 1,000 years from now as it is today? People long before that will think it appalling that in the early-21st century we just took water out of rivers and out of the ground and drank it without first removing all impurities. Yet we spend billions of dollars and risk many lives in protracted wrangling over what might happen to stored nuclear waste thousands of years into the future, on the very slim chance that radioactive materials will invade the water supply.

Meanwhile, we have knowledge today of medical trends that point toward pernicious effects of industrial chemical residues on human health, particularly that of children. Bette Hileman in her fine Insights piece (page 35) notes that a mere $26 million is needed annually to fund the National Children's Study, an inconsequential amount compared with that wasted in the battle over Environmental Protection Agency standards for the Yucca Mountain repository. Yet in the past two years, Congress has provided only $12 million annually. Not only should we do the children's study, we need to develop means of dealing with environmental contamination that is affecting human health now. Let's stop worrying about how an advanced society in the distant future will cope with what seems to us like a problem and pay more attention to present threats to our well-being.

Theodore L. Brown
Bonita Springs, Fla.