back to article Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime exhibition – blurs scientific interest with grotesque curiosity

"Within minutes of death, adult female blowflies arrive to lay eggs on a cadaver". So reads one of the captions at the Wellcome Collection's magnificently macabre: Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime exhibition. Morbid titillation, however, isn't the intent. The point is that forensic scientists can pinpoint the time of death by …

  1. phil dude
    Boffin

    molecular death...

    It seems on topic, but the very essence of life is the ability to metabolise. Every cell in our bodies (with some exceptions ) have mitochondria that produce the energy to do everything.

    It would seem possible if we had a sufficiently sensitive method to analyse the chemical substrate quantities in tissues that would be necessary while an organism is alive.

    Not so good for minutes, but probably pretty good for days?

    It would seem useful to have a generally applicable molecular definition...

    P.

    1. Bluto Nash

      Re: molecular death...

      Blowflies already give you approximate hour, get there before you do and they're free...

    2. Allan George Dyer

      Re: molecular death...

      Useful for what? For criminal cases, the focus is on establishing when the crime occured, so the possibility that the victim's mitochondria were still working hours after the murderer left seems irrelevant. For biochemical research, whether the organism is "alive" is less important than understanding the relevance of your experiment to the normal processes. Even cryonics (which, to me, just seems like a method for scamming dying rich people) is interested in "information-theoretic death", not molecular death.

  2. promytius2015

    Never been to D.C.?

    We have museum in Washington D.C.; you've heard of it, the Smithsonian something - anyway, the Pathology Museum there makes this article look like Rainbow Unicorns' lunch.

    Acres and acres of pathological trauma to the human body - George Washington's teeth (and other parts...), what happens when heads and helicopter blades meet, axes to the brain, poisons, smoked lungs, tape worms, rooms full of dead babies, and that's only part of a horrific childhood memory of a church trip to the nation's capital in 1962...

    What were they thinking! "try the medical museum, it's great!" I haven't slept in over 50 years!

    This article is the just what I needed to take a nap. Thanks.

    1. JimC

      Re: Never been to D.C.?

      And in Texas they've got one that is *even bigger*...

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