WHO INVENTED IT AND WHY?
Examination of footprints is the oldest type of forensic analysis. Early man tracked both his prey and his enemies by their prints, determining numbers, health, and direction of travel by examination of the scuffed dirt and trampled grass left behind. Armies have always marched in a manner specifically designed to cover their numbers by using the footsteps of the men in back to obscure those of the men before. The modern science of forensic footprint analysis is an extension of ancient hunting skills.
In ancient Babylon and China, contracts were sealed with fingerprints, and the prints of criminals were taken and stored. By the year 300, the Chinese were using fingerprints as evidence in criminal trials, gathering hand and footprints from crime scenes and using them to convict suspects.
It was in 1880 that Dr. Henry Faulds, a Scottish physician working in Tokyo, first developed a method of recording fingerprints using ink, as well as inventing a method to match latent prints to purposely recorded ones. An Englishman, Sir Francis Galton, devised the method of fingerprint classification that is used today, and an Argentinian police officer named Juan Vucetich created the first database of prints (on paper, in 1892). Finally, in 1902, a French cop named Alphonse Bertillon (who also invented the mug-shot), devised a means of lifting a print off a surface, and modern fingerprint analysis was born.
It was only natural that fingerprint authentication for the purposes of security would arise from the practice of fingerprint analysis. Computerized fingerprint scanners have been available for decades.
Other forms of biometric identification systems weren’t far behind. The idea that a retina could be used to identify a person was suggested in 1935 by a criminologist named Carleton Simon, but the technology wouldn’t catch up to his ideas until the nineties. Work began on facial recognition in the late sixties, when a team of computer scientists and mathematicians were given a book of mugshots and asked to invent a machine that could match faces from two different pictures. It wasn’t until 1997, however, that a workable means of fast, accurate face recognition was created.
DNA profiling and gene sequencing, like most modern scientific techniques, lack a single inventor. The techniques that gave rise to the current STR method of DNA profiling were first reported in 1984 in a paper written by a trio of researchers at the University of Leicester. Since then, hundreds of researchers and dozens of companies and universities have contributed to the continuing development of profiling techniques.
The first person to fully sequence a gene was a Belgian researcher named Walter Fiers, but that was just bacterial RNA—strictly the minor leagues. In fact, until fairly recently, sequencing the entire genome of a complex creature like a tube worm or a vole was so computationally intensive as to be functionally impossible. Until the nineties, computers simply didn’t have the chops to deal with the amount of information encoded in a single strand of DNA.
The Human Genome Project, launched in 1990, involved dozens of research centers and hundreds of scientists working nonstop for a decade and cost $3 billion. Nowadays, some high-end toilets come with a combination bidet/gene sequencer, but in the year 2000, when the genome was finally published, it was a big deal.
The purpose of doing this was to answer fundamental questions about both the structure of DNA and how it expresses itself. Because of gene sequencing, we now know for certain that things like cancer, schizophrenia, and heart disease have a genetic component, what genes to look out for, and one day soon, how to fix them.