MURFREESBORO — How does a bone break? More importantly, did it really
break the way someone told you it did?
At last week’s
CSI:MTSU summer camp, youngsters fascinated by forensic science found four days
filled with the same science and math they see in their regular junior high and
high school classes.
Of course, science
and math were even more intriguing than usual here because, like some of their
favorite crime shows, items were covered in “blood,” smashed against the ground
or tossed haphazardly into a bathtub. And there were no commercials breaking up
this crime procedural.
“There are patterns
we can see in bone and other substances that can help us understand what
happened,” Dr. Hugh Berryman explained to a room full of CSI campers in a
classroom at MTSU’s Horse Science Center.
“If someone says
that something happened one way, you can look at the way a bone fractured and
see what really did happen. You can confirm a story, or you can break a story
and find a lie.”
Berryman, a
world-renowned forensic anthropologist who teaches in MTSU’s Department of
Sociology and Anthropology and founded the university’s Forensic Institute for
Research and Education, specializes in bone fracture mechanics.
His colleagues at
last week’s event also shared their forensic expertise with the campers, including
his former student Dr. Alicja K. Lanfear, who taught campers the intricacies of
fingerprints.
“The detail in your
print is what's really going to make your print individual,” Lanfear, who is a
research assistant at the institute, told the students. “It's all in the
minutiae, in the details.”
The 2013 CSI
campers, like their predecessors since 2006, were faced with a re-creation of a
crime scene on their first day. Let’s just say this year’s involved a body and
blunt trauma and crime scenes in the Tennessee Miller Coliseum and the master
bath at the MTSU Foundation House —
knock on wood.
Campers get the
basic facts of the case and are shown how to collect and process evidence. They
learn how to conduct interviews and develop theories as a team, then present
their findings and conclusions to a panel of forensic scientists on the last
day of camp. (You can watch a brief video at http://youtu.be/luh_j19KpEE.)
They also learn that
even the experts still have questions they can’t answer.
“One mystery to me,
and I love it because I can’t figure it out, is the butterfly, or delta,
fracture,” Berryman said, pointing to an illustration showing a bone with a
wedge-shaped break, like a triangle popping out of a pipe.
“I don’t know WHY
this fracture goes in two directions. Why could it do that? We see a lot of it
in motor vehicle accidents and I want to know how it works, but I can’t figure
it out. I’ve been trying to since the late ’80s, long before you all were
born.”
It boils down to
physics, he told the group, but “the problem is that we don’t understand all
the elements.”
In addition to the
annual CSI:MTSU camps, the Forensic Institute for Research and Education offers
free public lectures featuring renowned forensic science experts each semester.
FIRE also provides
regular educational and training opportunities for law enforcement, medical
examiners, coroners, attorneys, social workers and other groups in forensic
science and homeland security.
For more information
about CSI:MTSU, including next year’s camp, visit www.csimtsu.com. You can learn more about FIRE by visiting www.mtsu.edu/fire or emailing fire@mtsu.edu.
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