 Getty Images |
Bottles containing poison could be found on household shelves a century ago. |
If you think the investigators on “C.S.I,” “Law and Order” and other cop shows have it tough, imagine what it was like a century ago – when a confessed poisoner went free because no one could prove he did it. Forensic science, as it’s practiced today on television and in thousands of real-life crime labs, hadn’t yet been invented.
“It wasn’t just that they didn’t have the tests,” Pulitzer-winning science writer Deborah Blum told me today. “They didn’t have the apparatus to do the tests.”
Blum tells the tale behind the birth of forensic science in “The Poisoner’s Handbook,” a saga that literally lets readers pick their poison.
…(read more)