Monthly Meeting
May, 2001
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Last night was the first time for the Dine Around Monthly Meeting. I think it is fair to say that it was a rousing success. The food was tasty and plentiful and the company was charming. Our speaker, Lou Szojka, Senior Forensic Scientist for the Philadelphia Police Department, Criminalistics Laboratory was fascinating.
One of the reasons it was decided to "move the meeting around" was to stimulate attendance and maybe get some people to attend who had not done much before. I saw familiar faces, faces I hadn't seen in quite awhile and several brand new faces. We even had one member who came all the way from Phoenixville! Talk about dedication in the ExComm, Stacy. Thanks to one and all who attended and we hope to see you at upcoming events. As for our speaker, Pete did it again. Despite some minor problems with the projector we all got a small dose of blood and guts. Most of the slides could easily have shown to school children as Mr. Szojka has demonstrated in the past. It was most interesting to hear how the Criminalistics Department develops physical evidence into found at the scene of a crime into a coherent presentation for the courts. I always thought that hair was a reliable means of identifying a person but apparently this is not the case. DNA evidence, on the other hand, has always been effective in ruling out a suspect but has now advanced to placing a suspect at a crime scene with accuracy on the scale of 1:1,000,000,000 or more. In simpler terms, DNA evidence can say that only 1 in a billion or trillion people has this particular profile. This is more compelling as time goes by. Maybe someday they will be able to use DNA evidence to project the physical characteristics of the person donating the sample. All in all, it was a good evening and we hope to do as well at Lehman's Tavern on June 10 at 5PM.
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