I just thought I'd share this, not because the story has any intrinsic merit, but because it illustrates how low standards can still be in some areas of science, and also the continuing dire state of journalism.
I'm interested in historical crime cases, particularly unsolved cases and miscarriages of justice. In the past, I did quite a bit of research into the Whitechapel Murders, including research into one of the near-contemporary suspects, Aaron Kozminski, who was a Polish Jew who had come to London with his siblings in the early 1880s.
To cut a long story short, six years ago I was approached for help by someone who appeared to be doing bona fide research on a garment (or possibly table-covering) that according to a family tradition came from the scene of one of the murders. He was working with a university academic to do DNA analysis on material recovered from the article, and wanted to obtain a sample from a relation of Aaron Kozminski for comparison. Although the historical evidence is strongly against this article having any connection with the murders, thinking he was acting in good faith, I helped him to contact a suitable relation, who - also assuming he was acting in good faith - provided a sample.
The result was a book (and accompanying media publicity campaign) the following year, claiming mitochondrial DNA matches to both the victim and the suspect, and that the case had been solved. Rather minimal details of the DNA analysis were given, but fortunately they were enough for a group of researchers to work out that the claimed match to the victim rested on an error (or probably a combination of several errors), and with the help of the then science editor of the Independent newspaper (now sadly deceased) this was confirmed by other academic geneticists and brought to public attention. The error had caused the author to claim that a particular feature, common to two DNA sequences, was extremely rare, occurring in only 0.0003506% of the population, when the true figure was above 90%:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/scien...04325.html
That should have been the end of it, or at least it should have caused the error to be acknowledged and corrected. That never happened, but thankfully not too much attention has been paid since then to the claim.
However, five years on, the academic who did the DNA analysis has published a nine-page, peer-reviewed "report" in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, repeating the claims of DNA matches, though quietly dropping the particular claim that had been exposed as an error previously. There are any number of problems with this report, and it has again been criticised by prominent academic geneticists and others. ("Unpublishable rubbish" was one description.) Just one of the problems is that although they claim a match between mitochondrial DNA obtained from the article and from the suspect's relation, in fact two out of the nine features compared did not match. Normal forensic practice is that if there are two or more differences between mitochondrial DNA sequences, the possibility of their belonging to the same matrilineal line can be excluded - except in particular circumstances which are not stated to apply here. But the authors say that at the points where the differences occur, their measurement of the sequence "could not be determined with high confidence" (my impression is that this was decided post hoc, though that's not made clear), and therefore they call it a match.
The papers have again lapped it up, stating as a fact that this article came from the crime scene, saying that the DNA matched and so on. I made a complaint to one of the papers - the London Evening Standard, normally considered a fairly respectable newspaper and edited by no less than the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne. After several weeks' delay they are offering to remove their description of the article as "blood-stained" (the published report does not claim to have established that there is any blood on it), though they have still not addressed the point about the DNA match/mismatch.
But the really depressing thing is that they have admitted their report was simply copied from news reports published online by others. They didn't look at the publication they were reporting on, they didn't base it on a press release - apparently they didn't do anything at all to check the accuracy of the information they were copying. Is it any wonder that we have problems with fake news when even "reputable" newspapers behave like this?
I'm interested in historical crime cases, particularly unsolved cases and miscarriages of justice. In the past, I did quite a bit of research into the Whitechapel Murders, including research into one of the near-contemporary suspects, Aaron Kozminski, who was a Polish Jew who had come to London with his siblings in the early 1880s.
To cut a long story short, six years ago I was approached for help by someone who appeared to be doing bona fide research on a garment (or possibly table-covering) that according to a family tradition came from the scene of one of the murders. He was working with a university academic to do DNA analysis on material recovered from the article, and wanted to obtain a sample from a relation of Aaron Kozminski for comparison. Although the historical evidence is strongly against this article having any connection with the murders, thinking he was acting in good faith, I helped him to contact a suitable relation, who - also assuming he was acting in good faith - provided a sample.
The result was a book (and accompanying media publicity campaign) the following year, claiming mitochondrial DNA matches to both the victim and the suspect, and that the case had been solved. Rather minimal details of the DNA analysis were given, but fortunately they were enough for a group of researchers to work out that the claimed match to the victim rested on an error (or probably a combination of several errors), and with the help of the then science editor of the Independent newspaper (now sadly deceased) this was confirmed by other academic geneticists and brought to public attention. The error had caused the author to claim that a particular feature, common to two DNA sequences, was extremely rare, occurring in only 0.0003506% of the population, when the true figure was above 90%:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/scien...04325.html
That should have been the end of it, or at least it should have caused the error to be acknowledged and corrected. That never happened, but thankfully not too much attention has been paid since then to the claim.
However, five years on, the academic who did the DNA analysis has published a nine-page, peer-reviewed "report" in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, repeating the claims of DNA matches, though quietly dropping the particular claim that had been exposed as an error previously. There are any number of problems with this report, and it has again been criticised by prominent academic geneticists and others. ("Unpublishable rubbish" was one description.) Just one of the problems is that although they claim a match between mitochondrial DNA obtained from the article and from the suspect's relation, in fact two out of the nine features compared did not match. Normal forensic practice is that if there are two or more differences between mitochondrial DNA sequences, the possibility of their belonging to the same matrilineal line can be excluded - except in particular circumstances which are not stated to apply here. But the authors say that at the points where the differences occur, their measurement of the sequence "could not be determined with high confidence" (my impression is that this was decided post hoc, though that's not made clear), and therefore they call it a match.
The papers have again lapped it up, stating as a fact that this article came from the crime scene, saying that the DNA matched and so on. I made a complaint to one of the papers - the London Evening Standard, normally considered a fairly respectable newspaper and edited by no less than the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne. After several weeks' delay they are offering to remove their description of the article as "blood-stained" (the published report does not claim to have established that there is any blood on it), though they have still not addressed the point about the DNA match/mismatch.
But the really depressing thing is that they have admitted their report was simply copied from news reports published online by others. They didn't look at the publication they were reporting on, they didn't base it on a press release - apparently they didn't do anything at all to check the accuracy of the information they were copying. Is it any wonder that we have problems with fake news when even "reputable" newspapers behave like this?
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