ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews arguments about Deoxyribonucleic acid DNA profiling between the prosecution and the "Dream Team" of defense lawyers in the OJ Simpson trial, and likened those arguments to positions in the science and technology studies S&TS literature. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the courts in the United States (U.S) and other nations repeatedly subjected DNA-profiling methods to critical scrutiny. Some of the U.S adopted admissibility standards that required the courts to conduct explicit socio-historical investigations of whether the novel techniques were "generally accepted" by relevant communities of scientists. Such trials of technique not only were interesting from the standpoint of the sociology of scientific knowledge, they constituted a veritable sociology of knowledge machine. The People and the Motion focus on two general types of Deoxyribonucleic acid DNA profiling technique: one type, which analyzes Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphisms RFLP, and another which employs the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR).
