John Buckleton

7.30 pm Tuesday, 21 April, Palmerston North Central Library, George Street, Palmerston North

The advent of DNA revolutionised forensic science. Questioning has transitioned to how and when the DNA got there.  Most commonly an innocent pathway for DNA transfer is proposed. This is termed Activity Level Evaluation because it considers the activity that deposited the DNA. Since about 2022 this has become a matter of intense heated debate in the US. Some argue that there is no method by which one can infer which of two different transfer routes makes the findings more probable. Using a murder of a young woman in Texas, I will outline some of the issues.

John Buckleton FRSNZ is a Principal Scientists at the New Zealand Institute for Public Health and Forensic Science (PHF Science). He has had a long involvement in forensic science in New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. He is one the developers of STRmix, a software package for the interpretation of forensic evidence that contains DNA from more than one person. That package has now been used in over 700,000 cases worldwide. The STRmix team won the Prime Minister’s Science Prize in 2018.