Question: Why are you doing it to find out the age & not maybe who it actually? Also whom inspired you (or multiple) to do this project with blood ; to sum up who inspired you and why to do it to for the age age -hope you find the research your looking for : hope you win.

Anastasia Aliferi answered on 11 Nov 2019:

That is an excellent question!

A lot of researchers are working on methods that can tell us exactly who committed a crime. The problem is that for all of these methods to work you need to compare the sample from the scene of the crime to a sample that you take from a suspect or a sample from someone that has previously committed a crime and therefore his/her sample is in the criminal database that the police uses. When you don’t have any suspects and the person you are looking for is not in that database you actually can’t identify them! There are some countries that are actually trying to solve that problem by making everyone in that country give a sample to the police, but this is not happening in most countries, definitely not in England. So in these cases, being able to tell the police that the person they are looking for is of a certain age can be very helpful for them and can help them narrow down the list of people who might have done it! This saves them a lot of time and can help catch someone faster and even stop them from committing another crime.

I was inspired to work on this project while I was doing my Master’s degree at King’s College London. We had a lecture on that topic and I found it very interesting because it combines biology, which is my favorite subject, and forensics! As part of the same course I also had to do a lab project and it so happened that this project was available and that the scientists working on it where very nice and we worked great together. It felt like it was meant to be!

Thank you so much for all your wishes! Best of luck with school and with everything you decide to do in the future 🙂