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Time - Man of the Year
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Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso
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1992-09-10
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THE WEEK, Page 22HEALTH & SCIENCEDNA Testing Gets An Unexpected O.K.
But a U.S. body urges great care in handling the technique
Defense lawyers must have been thrilled by the article on the
front page of the New York Times. It said a report about to be
released by the National Research Council would reject "DNA
fingerprinting," also known as DNA typing.
The practice involves testing material like hair or blood
from a crime scene and matching DNA in it to samples from a
suspect. In theory, the chances of a mistake are fewer than 1
in 100,000, compared with 1 in 10 for conventional blood typing.
But while DNA typing has been widely used since the
mid-1980s, defense lawyers often cried foul. The test, they
argued, is not always done carefully, and the results tend to
make jurors overlook other evidence. Now here was a respected
research organization urging courts to ban DNA fingerprinting
until the scientific basis for the technique could be
established more firmly. What could be better?
Except the report didn't say that. The council did propose
that the labs handling the testing be very strictly accredited
by an independent agency. It recommended that the odds of an
error be calculated and presented to juries more conservatively
than is now done. But it otherwise endorsed DNA fingerprinting
for solving crimes and said the method should continue to be
used in courts. That doesn't mean defense lawyers won't try to
get old cases reopened or move to bar DNA tests from new ones.
It does mean it will be harder for them to succeed than they
might have thought just a few days ago.