A forensic panel commissioned by Congress determined in 1978 that the Bethesda doctors had failed to dissect a wound in Kennedy's upper back and had only probed it with a finger.
To better understand the dilemma, I spoke with notable forensic psychiatrist Dr. Michael Welner, the Chairman of the Forensic Panel, who has worked on high-profile cases including those of Elizabeth Smart, Omar Khadr, and Andrea Yates.
To address this issue, we tested two independent protocols using our recently-developed forensic panel of SNPs.
Additionally, one marker in the final panel is a tetranucleotide repeat and currently used in a cat forensic panel (Menotti-Raymond et al. 2005).
As opposite to forensic panel, markers informative of population history show large allele frequency differences across populations including alleles, which are specific of a demographic group.
The SRY locus provides gender determination in the published forensic panel for cats (Menotti-Raymond et al. 2005); however, for this marker, females would present the same as a failed PCR reaction, making male identification less accurate.
As most of the markers in the proposed panel generate PCR products smaller than those in a recently recommended feline forensic panel (Menotti-Raymond et al. 2005), the international cat parentage and identification panel described in this study could also provide a useful complementary tool in forensic applications.
By using a limited number of commonly occurring polymorphisms as an identification panel and maintaining strict access to individual genotyping results, the panel avoids the potential legal and ethical burden of using a forensic panel, does not expose the population to increased identification risk, and may provide insight into population wide allele frequencies.
With the advent of biomedical research, the SNPs connecting physical anthropological, physiological, behavioral and phenotypic traits will be eventually added to the forensic panels that will revolutionize criminal investigation.
However, the use of forensic panels for sample identification may create ethical and legal challenges.
