ABSTRACT
One of the most common examinations requested of all forensic science labs is the comparison of stains of blood with known samples of blood from victims or suspects. The first forensic application of Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) profiling came in 1986 when a police officer in nearby Leicester asked Alec Jeffrey’s if his procedure could be used to confirm that a young man who had confessed to a double rape/murder had done it. The first forensic DNA case was therefore like so many since, exoneration. One of the many advantages of DNA, because it is inherited from one's parents, is that in the absence of a known sample from a missing person, samples of the DNA from the natural parents can be analyzed and the results used to predict the DNA profile of their offspring. Moisture and heat destroy DNA quite rapidly, and thus although there was a lot of blood, there was very little usable DNA.
