All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes

by Sue Black

For all the progress humanity has made, we are little closer to deciphering the complex bonds between life and death than we were hundreds of years ago.

empathy and sentimentality were often viewed as weaknesses,

there is no comfort to be had from soft words spoken at a safe distance.

death is not the demon we fear?

no matter how much modern medicine strives to intervene, death will ultimately prevail.

Forensic pathology seeks evidence of a cause and manner of death – the end of the journey – whereas forensic anthropology reconstructs the life led, the journey itself, across the full span of its duration.

could we undertake a three-dimensional human jigsaw puzzle to allow us to reveal not only the cause of death, which was indeed gunshot injury to the skull, but also the manner of death?

as the longer it has been, the more scars of experience will be written and stored within the body, and the clearer their imprint on our mortal remains will be.

Since we can’t influence the creation of our lives, and their end is unavoidable, perhaps we should be focusing on what we can regulate: our expectations of the distance between them. Perhaps it is this we should be trying to manage more effectively by measuring, acknowledging and celebrating its value rather than its duration.

during the course of my life, I have gained the prospect of an additional eleven years.

I didn’t get those extra years when I was twenty, or even forty. If I am given them, it will be when I am seventy-four.

Yet the maximum age to which our species is capable of living is not increasing. What is changing dramatically is the average age at which we die, and therefore we are seeing an increase in the number of individuals falling into the far right regions of the bell curve.

There was something reassuring about the certainty that the anatomy they encountered would be the same every time.

viscous fluid of the synovial joint space. I learned that when your hands

It is also an experience that immediately challenges your perceptions of yourself and others. You feel very small and insignificant when it dawns on you that here is someone who, in life, made the choice to give themselves in death to allow others to learn.

Today we go to great lengths to make our students’ first dissection as memorable and atraumatic as possible.

As a living person, you remain separate from death, but the mesmerising beauty of human anatomy has created a bridge into the world of the dead,

The fascination lies in the logic and order of the subject; the downside is the vast amount of information to be learned

the real heroes are undisputedly those extraordinary men and women who choose to bequeath their mortal remains so that others may learn: the anatomy donors.

Anatomy teaches you many things beyond the workings of the corporeal form. It teaches you about life and death, humanity and altruism, respect and dignity; about teamwork, the importance of attention to detail, patience, calmness and manual dexterity.

Formaldehyde is a disinfectant, a biocide and a tissue fixative

However, as Vesalius and Knox were obliged to dissect fresh remains, the very limited time they had with a cadaver probably did not engender the same bond of trust and respect between the dissector and the dissected

I learned so much in that year about myself as well as about the human form.

Anatomists don’t have to be particularly clever: they just need a good memory, a logical learning plan and spatial awareness.

The only way to establish it for certain would be to perform a postmortem which, as this procedure renders the body useless for dissection, would contravene the wishes of the donor. So as long as the death is not suspicious and is consistent with the age of the deceased, in many cadavers the cause will have been rationally deduced

moving service of thanksgiving for the gift of our bequeathers, attended by their families and friends, staff and students. I couldn’t know, when the names were read out,

allow us to pay our respects and demonstrate to the families and friends of the bequeathed just how crucial their gift has been, how much it was valued and how important in fostering the education of the next generation.

‘Humans belong to the group of conscious beings that are carbon-based, solar system-dependent, limited in knowledge, prone to error and mortal.’

the human desire for glimpses into the future to help us focus our attention today on what will ultimately prove worthwhile – or not.

as we near our allotted three score years and ten, life seems to speed up and we begin to become aware of how much we still have left to achieve.

The psychology surrounding identity and recognition of ‘self’ is extremely complex.

This freedom of individuality, and indeed its suppression, gives humans a unique capability and opportunity to play with their identity and to manipulate, or even change, the perception, portrayal and concept of ‘self’. It is here that I think Erikson omitted the third and most important category of identity, and the one that is most fun to play around with: physical identity.

Death may be a single event for the individual but it is a process for the body’s cells, and to understand how that works,

Each cell, tissue type and organ has its own life expectancy,

The liver takes a full year to replace all its cells and the skeleton almost fifteen years.

Theseus paradox – the question of whether an object that has had all of its components replaced at some stage remains fundamentally the same object.

just how much alteration can a biological entity sustain while remaining recognisable as the same individual and maintaining its traceable identity?

other components that persisted throughout his life and which continued to anchor his physical identity. Our job is to find such components.

There are at least four cell types in our bodies that are never replaced and which can live to be as old as we are – technically even longer, in the case of those formed before we are born.

Recent research has demonstrated that with the help of a fluorescent protein we can now see a memory being formed at the single synapse level.

the cells locked in this little bone already offer us opportunities to recover information about individual identity.

So the core components of every single cell, tissue and organ can be obtained only from what we ingest.

The nutrient building blocks required to construct our otic capsule were supplied by Mum from what she was eating around sixteen weeks into her pregnancy. So within our head, in that minute piece of bone just big enough to hold four raindrops, we will perhaps carry for the rest of our lives the elemental signature

tissues, hair and nails are rich sources of information about diet as their structure is laid down in a linear fashion and they grow at a relatively regular rate.

The ratio of carbon- and nitrogen-stable isotopes in our tissues may tell us something about diet:

from the stable isotope signature associated with water, we may be able to deduce where they have been living.

This can be extremely useful in trying to identify an unknown deceased person, or to track the movements of criminals.

We try to establish a time death interval (TDI) from information that the body releases. So forensic anthropologists need to understand not only how the body is built, but how it deconstructs.

The first is pallor mortis (literally, ‘paleness of death’), which starts within minutes and remains visible for about an hour.

The second stage, algor mortis (‘coldness of death’, or the death chill)