"Know how to dip hypo?" the head of the lab asked.
Cornwell gestured toward a slender scapula bone and asked, "Is this an older person, based on the thinning?" Bradley Adams, the head of the lab, nodded, and showed her a skull that had a round hole in the forehead and a splintered mass of bone in the back.
Looking to show visitors what they were capable of doing, William Higinbotham, the head of the lab's Instrumentation Division, collaborated with Robert Dvorak, a technical specialist.
"We've been working on this 10 years, and I want to see it happen," said Alex Pentland, head of the lab's academic program and a technology adviser to the company.
Since 1999, when the F.B.I. computerized its fingerprint database, its crime lab has matched about 1,200 crime scene prints, more than five times the number found in 15 years of laborious manual matching, said Stephen Meagher, the head of the lab's latent print operation.
The project proved three things, Carlo Ratti, head of the lab, told the BBC.
"It's a heck of a lotta light, for cheap," explains Michael Siminovitch, project head of the Lighting Lab at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California.
I had been in the lab for a month or two and when the gene was cloned, the person who was the head of the diagnostic lab put all the DNA samples he had access to from the local clinic on my desk.
"Papers are not created equally," John Viavattine, the head of the Torture Lab, said.
"It's a big puzzle," said Russell D. Gray, head of the Auckland lab.
Still, Dr. Bruce McEwen, head of the neuroendocrinology lab of Rockefeller University, said "it's kind of exciting".
