Jodrell Bank are honoured and very excited to announce that they will be live streaming The Royal Institution CHRISTMAS LECTURES this winter for the first time.
Join them to hear Professor Dame Sue Black, one of the world's leading forensic anthropologists, investigate the myriad of ways in which our bodies are tied to our identity, live inside the incredible Space Dome this winter.
About the lecture...
In a series of three Lectures broadcast between Christmas and the New Year, Professor Dame Sue Black will reveal the secrets of the real-life scientific detective process she uses to identify both the dead and the living.
Sue will give an unprecedented insight into her role in deciphering secret messages hidden within the body as she strives to name the unknown, reuniting dead and living bodies with their identity.
She'll reveal how extraordinary clues in our bones can reveal everything from our age, sex and medical history, to our diets and ancestry; as well as how the trend for body modifications – from split tongues to Teflon horns – has become a surprising forensic tool.
Sue will show how crimes can be solved from the smallest fragments of bones – using examples from her casebook – and contrasting the challenge of identifying someone from a single fragment, with the problem of identifying individuals in a mass grave which could have bones mixed from hundreds of skeletons.
You'll see how fingerprinting and DNA testing has helped resolve wrongful convictions, but how it's also led juries astray, with a special guest QC interrogating evidence live in the Ri Theatre, to reveal the limitations of this much-used tool of forensic science.
They'll also look at the future of identifying the living. Sue will reveal how she's developed a pioneering method of identifying criminals through the veins and wrinkles in their hands. And she'll ask whether ultimately our identity is actually contained most in our memories, and whether this could ever be mapped for truly fool-proof identification.
Sue will be joined in each lecture by leading specialists such as detectives, lawyers, pathologists, and dog handlers.
The 2022 CHRISTMAS LECTURES are co-produced by the Ri and Windfall Films and will be broadcast on BBC Four and iPlayer between Christmas and the New Year.
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