It’s refreshing,
renewing, and exhausting, getting together with other mystery writers. I’m not
even sure I can tell you about the bizarre (and fun) conversation at the
banquet table with several mystery writers I had never met before. You know,
the kind I mean. The one that would get you arrested in some places and dirty
looks in all the others. I’ll just mention one small part: the opinion that the
DC sniper made some mistakes and could have done it better. See?
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| The opulent Omni Hotel in Nashville |
The forensics
presentations were excellent. One by Dr. Mike Tabor, odontologist for the
Tennessee medical examiner. He touched on identification by teeth, but got
further into bite marks. Odontology, according to him, is a fancy word for
dentistry.
Dr. Lyle did a
talk on DNA and I learned the history of the different methods. It was first
used for profiling in 1984 and the method now used, which needs much less DNA
(even a single cell is enough), came into being in the 1990s. Now I know not to
reference these things at a time when they didn’t exist.
One very weird
thing he told us about is chimerism. This is where one fraternal twin absorbs
the other in the womb and one child, a chimera, is born with two sets of DNA.
When this happens, different body parts can have different DNA. A person also
has two sets when he has had a bone marrow transplant. The blood of that person
is the same as the donor, the rest of his body keeps its original DNA.
The two guests of
honor were William Kent Krueger and Lisa Jackson. Listening to them was very
worthwhile! I’ll blog more on that next week.
