Instant Genius - Forensic science comes to the Christmas Lectures, with Professor Dame Sue Black

Episode Date: December 23, 2022

Ever heard someone say: “I know them like the back of my hand”? It turns out the back of your hand can actually provide a forensic scientist with enough information to identify you. In this episode, forensic anthropologist Professor Dame Sue Black explains how the new science of digital identification works and discusses what we can expect from her upcoming Christmas Lectures. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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name audio, alongside French acoustic specialist focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analog warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name, audio.com to learn more. From BBC, science focus, this is instant genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. I'm Daniel Bennett, the magazine's editor. Today I'm talking to forensic anthropologist, Professor Dame Sue Black. Sue is one of the world's leading forensic scientists who has helped the EUN identify victims of war crimes and natural disasters.

And more recently, she's been building a scientific toolkit. that would help investigators identify suspects caught on camera from just an image of their hands. This year, Sue is delivering the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, a nearly 200-year-old tradition that will see her following the footsteps of the lives of David Atterborough and Carl Sagan. These are lectures you do not want to miss. They'll be airing on BBC 4 on Boxing Day, and they then continue every day after that. and after each lecture of which there's three, they'll appear on iPlayer. Just a quick note before we start, what follows is a frank discussion of Sue's work,

which includes identifying paedophiles from images. So if you think you might find this material upsetting, by all means, do join us in the next podcast. Otherwise, to kick things off, here's Sue telling me what the Christmas lectures mean to her. It's very daunting, I have to say, because I grew up. with my family watching these every single year. And I suppose I never thought at any point I would be a part of it. I mean, it is such an institution when you look at the Christmas lectures, how long they've been running, the incredible names of people who have given lectures. So I feel like a little bit of an imposter, I have to say, but I can remember probably most

strongly, and this shows how dreadfully old I really am, is that probably, I think it must have been about 1975 or so. And it was Heinz Wolf who was giving the lecture. And Heinz Wolf was a German physiologist, I believe. And he was so eccentric and so enthusiastic and totally different to any teacher that I had any experience off in my school. He was just suddenly this, you know, crazy scientist who was clearly so passionate about what he did. And he had the sort of sticky out mad scientist hair. And he made just such an inordinate impression, not only on the way he looked, but on the way he communicated and on the subject matter that he chose. So I can remember him talking about brain patterns. And I can remember him talking about the patterns of cells going

through blood vessels and just being astonished at all of this knowledge that I knew nothing about. And it was the one that probably stuck with me more than any. But as my children grew up, of course, I turned into the adult that watched it with them. So it was lovely to meet people that I know coming on, the likes of Alice Roberts or Hannah Fry, which was just lovely because you could see the real passion in them and the ability that they have to communicate their science at different levels. And I think for forensic science,

it's in quite a privileged position because we are required to always engage at a specific level with the public. Because when we go into the courtroom, our job is to give evidence that helps the jury to understand what is being said, and it helps them, therefore, to make their decision on guilt or innocence. So we're quite used to placing our science at a level

that is understandable by all members of the public. And, you know, given that my parents' level of science understanding was probably equivalent, to the last time they'd studied it in school, it means it's an incredible level playing field that it's science conveyed in a way that everybody can understand. And that just makes it such a privilege, such an honour. Terrifying, I have to say,

because it's going to be out there in the archives forever. But having done some of the rehearsals now, I can't actually wait to get it done. Yeah, and actually one thing that has struck me always when I've been lucky enough to speak to the people doing the lecture each year, is the team around you. I don't know if that necessarily comes across in the final product. Obviously, these days, there are different scientists who join in, but there is quite a big science team around you that is quite important in the delivery of these, lots and that. Well, there's a huge team if you look at it. I mean,

it's a massive operation. It's one of the biggest things that the Royal Institution does every year. So you have the partnership between you as the presenter, the production company, which is Winfall, the BBC and the Royal Institution. And then within the Royal Institution, you have different levels of team that are around you. And you get the most wonderful demo team who are marvellous. And I think they probably have the best job in the world because they get to sit and plan how they're going to make all these demonstrations work. And it's just, you know, it's blue Peter, isn't it? You know, creating things to be able to show and explain science. I think it's a fantastic job.

I've often wondered how that works. So do you get to just roughly saying, I'd love it if we could do this? And then they go figure that problem. It goes in all directions. So we sit down and we talk about what do we want each of the three lectures to look like? what can we use that will punctuate the story that we want to tell with something that's visually memorable? And then I might have the idea and they'll go, that'll never work. Have you thought about this? Or they'll come out with an idea and I say that's not quite how it works and so we'll

reframe it and remodel it. So it really is an iterative process. But when you think that I started talking with the Royal Institution back around Easter time, that gives you an idea of how long it takes to get to this point. And it seems to have been, you know, relatively easy up till now. And now somebody's hit the fuel pack. And so we've, you know, we've really accelerated into this phase of thinking, are we ready? Can we get this done in time? Does this work? We're going to have to change that. That's the wrong order. And it's that mild panic you have in the week before you settle down and record it. And we get it all wrong this week so that hopefully we get it right next time. And so I'd love to know if for someone listening to this and before we go on to

talk about some of your work, what can you share about what they can expect from your lectures? What will we be learning about this year? So it would be a really, really strange set of lectures for anybody who knows me and knows what I do, not for there to be some bones in there somewhere. There have to be bones in a body somewhere. Otherwise, what on earth would I be talking about so that we will look at identity and we'll look at how we identify who an individual is or may have been. But then we want to be able to follow that process all the way from the crime scene to the courtroom. So that will give you some idea of where it's going. Props are always a big part of the lectures. And given your discipline of forensic science,

I'm deeply curious about any props you might be. bring? Is there anything you're able or allowed to share about what we might see in there with you in the lecture hall? So the props and the volunteers are always the two most important things. And so being able to match what it is you want to do in the prop with what's appropriate for the age range that we're presenting in front of is extremely important. So everything is safe. That's the most important thing. So whatever we do in there, safety is at the foremost of our intention. Where we need to give a little bit of a warning about something that might be loud or something that might be a little challenging to watch, then there'll be warnings. People can look away.

But we are very, very aware that our audience is between 11 and 17 years old. That's our primary group. And so everything we're doing is going to be geared towards something that is appropriate for them. So we are not going to see, you know, huge amounts of gore and violence and whatever else it may be. We will place it into a context that's appropriate. You've had a long and illustrious career in forensics and I could sort of quiz you about so many different parts. But I'm particularly sort of interested in something we talked about last time we were able to do this. And that's how you've sort of been working on identifying people through digital images and in particular hands. So I just want to ask, so for anyone who might not have sort of be familiar with this work,

how did that come about? How did you get to the point where you realised that you could use a hand to identify someone in a criminal case? The police got in touch with me to say they had a video and they would like me to have a look at the video because they wanted to determine whether the person in the video was the person that they had arrested for the crime. And it was a young teenage girl who alleged that her father came into her room at night and abused her. And she told her mother and her mother didn't believe her. So what she did, brave, incredibly brave young young. girl was she left her camera on on her video knowing that she would capture that abuse again. And what we saw at half past four in the morning was a hand and a forearm. That was all we saw coming into the field of vision. So you never see a face or anything else. And because she left her camera on, the camera goes on into near infrared light. And when near infrared light shines onto human skin, there's an interaction with the deoxygenated blood in veins. And so you can see

vein pattern stands out like black tram lines on your skin. And so the police said, look, we've only got this hand and forearm. Is there anything you can do? And I've said, I have no idea. I've never done anything like this before in my life, but let's have a look. And because we could see the vein pattern, what I could tell them because I'm an anatomist, is that we know the veins, superficial veins in our body, are highly variable. And in fact, if you look at the pattern on the back of your right hand, it will be different to the pattern on the back of your left hand. And if your identical twins, they will be different between you. So the veins form as a result of tensions within oxygen pressures and various other things when you're a baby inside your mum. And once those

vein patterns form, they tend not to change. So we know that they're your pattern and nobody else's pattern. So I could look at these vein patterns on the image and I could say, well, I can see them. I can compare them with your suspect. And if they don't match, I can tell you with a hundred percent certainty, it's not him because your veins won't change. However, if the patterns of veins are the same, all I can tell you is I can't exclude him, but I can't tell you with what degree of certainty. It's likely that your suspect and your offender are the same person. And so the police said, well, we'd like to have a go, because even if we can exclude Dad, that's a good step forward.

So I did a comparison of the vein patterns on the back of the hand and the forearm between suspect and offender, and they matched perfectly. So when it went to the Crown Prosecution Service, they said, well, this kind of evidence has never been given in a UK court before. Let's try it. Let's test it out. And that's one of the things about the courtroom is that often it is the science that is on trial, as well as the scientist, not just the crime. And so I went into court and the judge called a voir dire. And what the voir dire does is he asks the jury to leave. And the judge then makes a decision on whether he will allow the evidence to be heard in his courtroom. And he's effectively making a decision on whether he thinks this is witchcraft and has no substance to it whatsoever or whether in fact there is some substance.

And he decided because anatomists understand variation in the human body and we've documented it since, the times of Vesalius and the 1500s, that we really do understand what we're talking about. And when you linked that to the work that is done in the biometrics industry for security, then what we could see is that both sets of data were saying the same thing. So one was corroborating what the other was suggesting. So he allowed the evidence to be heard in court, and that was the first time in the UK. The jury went away and deliberated, and they came back and they found Dad not giving. guilty. And that was a real shock for us because it said, who else then was in her room at half

past four in the morning doing what she said was happening and had an identical vein pattern. So I asked the barrister, what did I do wrong? Because you always blame yourself. Could I have done something better? And it's the words that she gave me that really sent a chill down my back. She said, no, there was no problem with your evidence at all. They just simply didn't believe the girl. She didn't break down and she didn't cry. If she'd broken down, they'd have believed her. Now, this was an incredibly brave young girl who'd accused her father, who'd left her camera on to record it again, who'd taken her case to the police. And for her to be judged in court, probably on the basis of how she behaved that day, I felt was not serving justice. And that's

why we started the research that we've done. And since that time, we've helped the police in hundreds of cases now of abuse. 82% of our cases result in a change of plea, which is an enormous rate. And that means that, of course, we save a tremendous amount of money in the courtroom. But much more importantly, what we do is that we mean young, that means that young people like that girl don't have to go into court to give evidence against their father or whomesoever. it may be, and they don't have to run the risk of not being believed. So it's a huge win. This is her legacy. Wherever she is in the world, I hope that one day she hears my story and knows it's her story so that she will know that the research that we do and all the cases

that we've helped the police with now is her legacy. And we've probably helped to secure around 35 to 40 life sentences now and probably over 500 years, if not more, of prison sentencing. And that's as a result of her bravery, which I think is just a tremendous, tremendous accolades to her and what she went through at that time. And just to clarify in case anyone's not familiar with the court procedure. So a change of plea means that you were able to present the evidence to the opposing legal team such a compelling manner that, you know, that they decided, okay, we better change. Normally what will happen when a suspect is being questioned, and they're always questioned

in the presence of their own lawyer. They will either give a no comment. So you see it on the television programs. They say no comment. So that they're not committing themselves to saying, I have done it or I haven't done it. And often, you know, that will wait to see how the evidence is going to play out. When our report, lands on the desk in front of their council and the council then has the discussion with their client that's the point at which the the accused is changing their plea from either not guilty or a no comment response to yes okay it is me and as i understand it you didn't of course just leave it there at um vein patterns you you sort of refine this uh with quite a fair bit of literature

into sort of all the different hallmarks of the hand. I just wonder if you go into just quite how unique our hands can be and how they compare to something that we're probably very familiar with, like a fingerprint. But if you remember the old saying, we know it like the back of our hand, is that we do know the back of our own hand. If you see a photograph, you would recognise it's your hand because there are only two parts of our body much of the time

that are in view to the public. It's our face and our hands. And we recognize people primarily from their faces. But if I saw photographs of my mother's hands or my father's hands, I would recognize them. I would know. We do recognize people from their hands. And if you look at your own hands, you'll see it in there, either your mother's hands or your father's hands. I've got my father's hands.

My mother had the most delicate feminine hands. And my father had these huge shovels of hands. I got my father's hands. And so I look at them every day and I see my father. because there is a genetic predisposition towards a particular form of hand. But many of the other features are features that develop when you're in utero inside your mum, or develop when you're out in the real world and you're exposed to environment or trauma. So, for example, if you look at the features that develop when you're a baby inside your mum,

the vein pattern is one of those. The other is the pattern of skin creases across your knuckles. And they form when you're a very young fetus in response to the fact that the joints form, and so the fingers flexes because the muscles on the flexer side, the forearm at the front, are stronger than the ones at the back. So when we extend our fingers, our skin creases into wrinkles. And those wrinkles, they're different in every finger and different across both of your hands. Then if you look at things that are environmental but with a genetic predisposition, I'm a redhead.

So I'm going to have freckles. And those freckles have a unique pattern to me. So although my cells are going to lay down, those melanocytes are going to lay down that pigment, they lay it down in a random pattern. The same is true of birth marks or moles, for example. They will be, you'll have a predisposition towards them, but where they actually occur is quite random. If you've had burns or if you've had cuts on your skin, then you'll have scars. And those scars will be in a particular place for you, will have healed in a particular way, will be a particular size.

So once you start to layer all these things that we can see on the back of your hand, not on the front, the palm of your hand, which is where our fingerprints are, but on the back of your hands, then there are lots of features caused by lots of different things that means that when, When you stack them all together, it's a bit like a multi-modal biometric, then the chances of any two people, having all of these features the same, is extremely unlikely. That's fascinating because I suppose as well, just the way you described it there, you're always seeing science fiction. They scan the palm of your hand, and actually they probably should be scanning the top. Well, I'd like them to do both, because there are things you see on the palm of your hand that you don't see on the palm of your hand that you don't see on. the back of your hand. So on the palm of your hand, of course, you're going to get fingerprints,

but you also get palm prints. And the skin creasing that we have in the palm is also different between individuals. And I know that palmistry likes to read our future in those. I'd actually like to read your identity in them rather than your future. So I would love to see us in a position where when we have individuals who have been charged with a crime, that not only do we take their fingerprints, but we take a full palmer view and a full dorsal view of their hand. And if they are then convicted of that crime, then what we're able to do is to be able to trawl through the database of all of these offending images that we have and see if that individual is responsible for more than the one crime in which we've already arrested them. So we could link historical crimes if we're

able to do that. Is that work you can give to a computer to sort of, you can give it the algorithm to go and identify that? So we were very lucky. The European Research Council funded us to the tune of two and a half million pounds to look at that exactly. So when you, if you imagine we're looking at these images and they are quite distressing images sometimes, whether it's us looking at them or the police. And so we first of all train the computer to look at the images. To look at the images, and they are quite distressing images sometimes, the computer to look at the images and to look at the videos and to abstract any hand that they can find in there. So that means we don't have to look at the rest of the image. Once we've abstracted the hand, what we do is we train the computer, can you find the veins? And then we train

them, can you find the skin creases? Can you find any what we call punctate pigmentation, whether that's freckles, moles, or with age, liver spots, or depigmentation, which might be where you have scars or where you have burns. And so by all of these different algorithms, we create this multiple algorithm that says this is the algorithm for this hand. Can we now send that algorithm off into Interpol's databases or any other police forces database to say, can we pick up crimes anywhere else in the world? But to be able to get, first of all, to training the computer, to be able to identify and restrict vein patterns or skin crease patterns, we have to have a database to train them.

And so what we have is we have three data sets. We have one where the public are photographing their own hands with their mobile phones in poses that we tell them, and they send those into us. And we need about 5,000 of those. We strip out all the identifying information. So we don't have a name or an email address or anything associated with them. we just have the images. And we have a second data set of known individuals where we take very high quality images of

their hand. So there's where we do the first training of the computer. But then we also take mobile phone images of those hands. And then as a second step, train the computer to say, these are the ideal images. These are the not-so-ideal images. And can you still find the individual in these not-so-ideal images? that allows us then to work on the public database image. And in that sort of state, we're creating those algorithms.

Those algorithms are what then go into the police databases, and we've got a sterile corridor between what is our research group and what is the investigative material that police are using. So, police never gain access to our research images, only the algorithms that are the output from them. And the third data set, which has been looked at by Dundee University, is a 3D scan of hands. And we're looking at how much information, anatomical information, is lost when we change the resolution of the image or when we change the position of the hand.

Because it may well be in some images, we can only see 30% of the hand. And the question is, is there any value in just looking at that 30% or should we just call it quits and say, you need to have this bit of the hand or that percentage of the hand to be able to make that decision. For someone listening who this is all, might be all new to them, what's the scale of this problem? And how much of your, you know, you talked about being an anatomist and you have a love of bones, is your work now being pulled more in this sort of digital direction just by the nature of how we record everything and and and and and and that's the going back to the initial part of the question is is it is the scale of crime with these kind of digital I suppose digital trail is that is it becoming a bigger and

bigger problem so the first part of my life in the sort of forensic anthropology as you would expect it normally to progress which is bones and bodies um I would say that I've spent a lot of time training teams to come behind me so that when I fall off the perch, as inevitably happens, that there is a fully trained set of teams behind me. And so much of that forensic anthropology work goes on in those teams. It allows me time to look more at the research element. My research has very much been taken over by the digital processes. And this whole, how can you identify somebody from images of the individual or parts of the individual. And when we did that first case,

there was no doubt that the police said to us, I warn you know, you're going to be inundated because this is a crime that is on such a rise that we simply cannot prosecute our way out of it. So any way in which technology can assist us is going to be really important. And what they mean by that is I will take on, on average we would take on maybe a case a week.

Now, bearing in mind, most of the cases the police do don't require our involvement. So we're the very sort of last point of contact for them that says we've tried everything else. Can you now help us? So that there is something, I can't remember the actual figure, but it's something like 10 million new images of child abuse go on the dark web every hour. and that gives you some idea of the volume that the police are trying to cope with. And in a world where now it doesn't matter where you are in the world, you can share those images with like-minded individuals. It means that the crime is truly global.

And people who might have had an inclination in that way in the past would have found it very difficult to play out that inclination now with digital access, it's so much easier for them. And when you speak to judges, judges say that most of the time that they spend in court, in their courtroom, are either on domestic violence or they're on sexual crimes, whether those sexual crimes are between adults or between adults and children. And so that just shows the, you know, the absolute enormity of the problem facing our investigative forces. And unfortunately, we know that during COVID, that crime rate increased because people were at home and they were incarcerated at home, perhaps with their children,

but also having greater access out onto the internet. So where does it go from here? I mean, you help court identify people in criminal cases, you know, which is going to happen piece by piece, but with the sheer volume of what's out there, what is the future of solving this kind of crime? Is there some kind of technology solution out there that could make trading in these images or uploading these images impossible? So I think that has to be a possibility because we're never going to solve this just from one perspective. The crime is like a multi-headed hydra.

You cut off one head, another three grow. And so it needs to be addressed from all sides. Science and technology need to have ways forward to be able to help the investigative forces either prevent the crime or once the crime has been committed to solve the crime. If you're going to prevent the crime and it's primarily digital now, then you need to have that level of digital intervention. And whether that comes down to some of the major IP providers or, you know, it's beyond my ability to, to predict what that may be. I'm just an anatomist, which is why I can go out and I can speak to all of these wonderfully clever, technological and digital people and say, help us, please, how do we do this? But I think policy also has a role in legislation has a role in there as well that says, how can we persuade these companies to make sure that they have safer, stronger

mechanisms of creating that gatekeeper role that doesn't allow these images to be loaded up or to be transmitted. And if they do, then don't the sanctions need to be so extreme that actually it discourages people from doing it. And then there's the whole side about education. It's about educating children about their own safety, not just online, but in the home environment and in the school environment and in their social environment. It's about educating parents what to look for in terms of signals and how they can help to protect their children. There's just so many ways in which we have to all come together to try to address what is a scourge because at the end of the day, the child who is in this is a victim, whether they may appear to be willing or

otherwise, they are a victim because it is a crime. And it will stay. It will stay with them in one way or another for the rest of their life. And that has an impact, an impact on them, an impact on their families, and an impact on the future relationships that they make. So there's a real societal drive to address this problem. And then just lastly on that, you do go out and I've watched one of your talks before this interview for my research and talk to technologists, you know, the people who develop platforms and software, do you leave those kind of conferences with a sense of optimism that this is something we might be able to, you know, use the analogy of car crime that cards have become just so hard to steal now that people

don't bother? Do you think we can end up there that there will be sort of some software one day in place that will make this so hard to disperse these images? Are you optimistic? I have to hope that we will. So I have to have the optimism that we will. We're an incredibly intelligent and inventor species. You know, we've put people on the moon. We've put, you know, vehicles on planets around our system. You know, we can do this. We've created an internet. If we create it, then surely we can manage it. And I do believe that there is the will and the global will because it is a global problem. So it's a global will to actually address this problem in a multi, a multidirectional manner, because no one group will ever do it on its own.

Technology is a strong part of that. The providers are a strong part of it. Education is the government, legislation and policy, the police, all of them need to get them together with that will. And so I have to have the hope that we can do it because I think we genuinely can if we want to. And when you think about it, it's a personal crime in terms of you imagine it happening to your children or your grandchildren. Why would you not then have that drive to say, we need to fix this? We do need to fix this. That was Professor Dane Sue Black then, talking about how we might tackle the problem of child pornography online. Again, don't miss this year's lectures, which will air on BBC 4 on Boxing Day, and each lecture will appear on iPlayer after it airs.

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