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Zusatztext 103788779 Informationen zum Autor Patricia Wiltshire Klappentext From "the Queen of Forensic Science" ( The Wall Street Journal ) comes a riveting blend of nature writing and true-crime narrative that explores the often shocking cases of a trailblazing scientist and investigator. From mud tracks on a quiet country road to dirt specks on the soles of walking boots, forensic ecologist Patricia Wiltshire uses her decades of scientific expertise to find often-overlooked clues left behind by criminal activity. She detects evidence and eliminates hypotheses armed with little more than a microscope, eventually developing a compelling thesis of the who, what, how, and when of a crime. Wiltshire's remarkable accuracy has made her one of the most in-demand police consultants in the world, and her curiosity, humility, and passion for the truth have guided her every step of the way. A riveting blend of science writing and true-crime narrative, The Nature of Life and Death details Wiltshire's unique journey from college professor to crime fighter: solving murders, locating corpses, and exonerating the falsely accused. Along the way, she introduces us to the unseen world all around us and underneath our feet: plants, animals, pollen, spores, fungi, and microbes that we move through every day. Her story is a testament to the power of persistence and reveals how our relationship with the vast natural world reaches far deeper than we might think. Chapter 1 Beginnings Imagine, for a moment, that you are walking in a winter wood. The ground is soft beneath your feet; something catches your eye-something untoward, something not quite natural, in a depression just off the beaten track. Perhaps you are here walking your dog (this is the way so many stories start). Perhaps the dog hurtles off into the undergrowth and whines. As you fight through the brambles to reach it, you have a moment of foreboding-and, looking down, you realize why . . . for there in front of you where the dog has frantically scraped the soil, the lifeless hand of a body is exposed, its pallor stark against the black humus. It was not so very long ago that identifying the culprit in a crime like this might have been possible only by the testimony of witnesses or the confessions of the accused. Within living memory, and in the absence of any clues to its identity or to connect it to a potential suspect, a body discovered in a shallow grave might have remained a mystery forever. But times move on. The world of forensic detection gathers pace. We are all familiar with the idea of fingerprints, and they have even been found in prehistoric pottery. The ancient Chinese and Assyrians used fingerprints to establish ownership of clay artifacts and, later on, documents. Sir William Herschel insisted on having fingerprints as well as signatures on civil contracts when he was a British administrator in India in 1858. Fingerprint analysis was firmly established by the late nineteenth century and, in 1882, Alphonse Bertillon, a French anthropologist, was routinely recording fingerprints on cards in his academic research into variation in people and, by 1891, the Argentine police had started fingerprinting criminals. The field developed apace and, in 1911, fingerprinting became accepted by the US courts as a reliable method of identifying individuals. Fast forward to 1980 to the first computerized database of fingerprints, NAFIS (National Automated Fingerprint Identification System), established in the United Kingdom and the United States. In the 1990s, another quantum leap was taken in forensic detection with a development of DNA profiling. This, like fingerprinting before it, enabled the unique imprint of an individual to be captured but by taking samples of blood, semen, body cells, or roots of hairs. This development transforme...
