Axing of Forensic Science Service may lead to rise in miscarriages of justice, scientists warn

sentencing

David Bryant for sexual assault of minors will be the ultimate triumph of pioneering forensic team

In a few weeks, David Bryant will appear in Newcastle upon Tyne Crown Court to be sentenced for the kidnapping and indecent assault of four girls in 1980 and 1990. The grandfather of 65 - who pleaded guilty in January - you can expect a long sentence

Carry Bryant justice, decades after his crimes, was a triumph for the Forensic Science Service. Several techniques developed by researchers in Wetherby, West Yorkshire, helped solve the case.

But for scientists, it will also be a last hurray. A few weeks after stopping Bryant, the center of Wetherby will be closed and its scientists will be laid off. The service will cease to exist.

"We take to the grass," said Dr Jonathan Whitaker, a Principal Investigator Forensic. "We have developed a range of new ways to use DNA to track criminals. Now they are closing. The nation loses the ability to develop new forensic techniques. It is very sad."

The government says that the FSS was losing up to 2 million pounds per month. At the close, private laboratories and the police can do their jobs at a lower cost - an idea that has been denounced by Sir Alec Jeffreys, the inventor of DNA profiling. He was "a mentality of bean counting imagination who does not understand how forensic science progresses," he said. In last week

New Scientist

, over 75% of 365 forensic experts who responded to a survey said they believed SFS closure could lead to more Justice involuntary abortions. Police personnel "in house" laboratories would be more likely to be under pressure in the supply of detectives wanted results, they warned.

Moreover, new forensic techniques and dry without the funds being provided by the FSS. The service has enabled researchers time and money to work on new methods to solve serious crimes - with David Bryant case provides a perfect example

In May 1983, a period of three years was reading a book in his garden in Southampton, when a man posing as a doctor, took her to a nearby forest and sexually assaulted. The detectives linked the case to one of Gosport, Hampshire, where a girl was abducted and sexually assaulted five years in 1982.

• remained unsolved crimes, like the other two cases, apparently unrelated to the north of England in 1995, in which two girls were caught outside their homes and raped in Newcastle, the one in May and another in September. DNA, introduced in 1986, connected the two cases, but did not provide the identity of the rapist.

In 2011, the detectives decided to reopen the case and asked Hampshire to help the FSS. Its scientists began with the review tapes that forensic investigators have used to catch the outer fibers of the clothes the rapist. "We realized that we could use as a source, not fiber, but the fabric rapist," said Whitaker. "He could have allowed small samples of semen or blood invisible."

small fragments of biological material have been isolated over time. The FMT went to the profiles of low copy number (CNIL), a technique that was developed in 1999 to generate DNA profiles from tiny samples of skin or semen. The two samples of girls in New Hampshire had the same profile, indicating that she was raped by the same man.

This profile was then placed in the national database of DNA, which contains more than five million samples from crime scenes or persons arrested or detained by police. Profile of Hampshire coincided with that of girls being raped in Newcastle, even though these crimes have been solved as well.
However, the FSS had more weapons in its arsenal. In 2001, Whitaker helped to develop research in the family DNA, which could be a list of parents of potential profile created by an unknown criminal subject to a special computer search the national database of DNA. This technique was first used to track the killer of three young girls in Cardiff 30 years ago. This time, the search for the family has produced a list of dozens of family members as possible.

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