Question: How would you tell how old you are with a drop of blood and how it will help the police?

Anastasia Aliferi answered on 11 Nov 2019: last edited 11 Nov 2019 12:45 pm

Our blood (as almost everything in our body) contains our DNA, which is basically a code that tells our body how to work. I’m actually looking at that DNA.
Now to the tricky bit, our DNA doesn’t change as we get older – or we might turn into bananas, who knows?! But even though we always have the same DNA we get gray hair and wrinkles, don’t we? What we’ve found is that there is a substance, much like chewing gum, that sticks on that DNA and the more it sticks the more difficult it is for it to work. For example the part that makes our hair the correct colour gets so much gum on it that in the end the code is hidden and our body has no option but to give it no-colour, which is white!
So what I’m doing is looking at the amount of gum on our DNA and from it I can calculate how old someone is.

How does this help the police? Imagine that you have a crime scene, someone broke into someone else’s house by breaking the window and they stole a lot of things.The police has no witnesses, no suspects and there were no cameras around! What happened though, is that the thief cut him/herself breaking that window and even though they were very careful not to leave any fingerprints behind, they did leave a drop of blood on the glass. If I can figure out how old they were from that drop of blood that narrows down the number of people the police are looking for and they can catch them much faster, even before they manage to sell all the stolen goods!