Fingerprinting Books

A fingerprint is an impression of the friction ridges of all or any part of the finger.  Private investigators may examine fingerprints or fingerprint impressions during a crime scene investigation, or while investigating a theft.

The following books provide helpful information on the subject of Fingerprinting. These books will help you learn how to:

• Understand how fingerprints are lifted from a crime scene and how the are analyzed and linked to a person
• Understand the other types of prints that might be left at a crime scene such as lip prints, hand prints, mouth prints, etc.
• Learn the types of equipment used in fingerprinting such as fingerprinting ink, pads, and forms

Fingerprints: The Origins of Crime Detection and the Murder Case That Launched Forensic Science (Hardcover)

Fingerprinting Book Description - From Publishers Weekly - Beavan's lively debut explores developments in criminal Forensics that culminated in the first prosecution based on fingerprint evidence, in London in 1905. He opens his narrative with the wanton double murder of the elderly Farrows and the crude initial investigation. Beavan, a writers for Esquire and other magazines, examines at length the slow scientific inroads into 19th-century law Enforcement. Following the sharp decline in hanging offenses, European societies were swept by hysteria regarding multi-aliased career criminals. Officials reluctantly explored ways of confirming identities of repeat offenders, notably Alphonse Bertillon's anthropometric system, which posited that "criminal" body types could be identified by minute bodily measurements. Several British bureaucrats had experimented with inked fingerprints identification, but Henry Faulds, an impoverished Scottish medical missionary in Japan, definitively claimed that fingerprints' particular qualities were ideals for criminal prosecution. Faulds' early publications spawned fingerprint science; Unfortunately, his thunder was stolen by the ambitious, better-positioned Francis Galton (Darwin's cousin), whom Beavan portrays as an effete plagiarist.
 

Police in South America and India ventured into this terra incognita, but Scotland Yard fiercely resisted. Only tragic anthropometric and eyewitness misidentifications led grudging officials to use the Farrows trial as a test case. The embittered Faulds served as a defense witness, contending that single-digit identification, the basis for this ultimately successful prosecution, was unreliable. This entertaining and balanced work centers less on academic precepts than does Simon Cole's Suspect Identities (see review below). Beavan's effortless prose, firm grasp of his subject and vividly drawn characters will delight history buffs and armchair criminologists. Photos and illus. (May) Forecast: This is a charmer that, with good reviews and effective promotion, could catch on outside the true-crime crowd. There will also be online promotion at the Web site www.fingerprintbook.com. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business information, Inc.

Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Paperback)

Fingerprinting Book Description - "No two fingerprints are alike," or so it goes.  For nearly a hundred years fingerprints have represented definitive proof of individual identity in our society. We trust them to tell us who committed a crime, whether a criminal record exists, and how to resolve questions of disputed identity.

But in Suspect Identities, Simon Cole reveals that the history of criminal identification is far murkier than we have been led to believe. Cole traces the modern system of fingerprint identification to the nineteenth-century bureaucratic state, and its desire to track and control increasingly mobile, diverse populations whose race or ethnicity made them suspect in the eyes of authorities. In an intriguing history that traverses the globe, taking us to India, Argentina, France, England, and the United States, Cole excavates the gotten history of criminal identification--from photography to exotic anthropometric systems based on measuring body parts, from fingerprinting to DNA typing. He reveals how fingerprinting ultimately won the trust of the public and the law only after a long battle against rival identification systems.

As we rush headlong into the era of genetic identification, and as fingerprint errors are being exposed, this history uncovers the fascinating interplay of our elusive individuality, police and state power, and the quest for scientific certainty. Suspect Identities offers a necessary corrective to blind faith in the infallibility of technology, and a compelling look at its role in defining each of us.

DNA Fingerprinting

Fingerprinting book.  Gr. 9-12. After breezing through a mini-lesson on the basics of DNA and genetics, Fridell adeptly moves to the 1980s, during which geneticist Alec Jeffreys and future Nobel Prize winner Kary Mullins individually, and almost simultaneously, connected two links of the genetic puzzle that made DNA fingerprinting possible. From those history-shifting discoveries, Fridell then takes readers on a lucid, emotionally charged journey to discern how the technique has been used in the courts to convict the guilty, free the innocent, and even inspire legal treachery. Fridell also takes a look at less well-known ways DNA fingerprinting is used--among them, in the protection of wildlife--and explains how it factored in determining Thomas Jefferson's lineage and in the investigation of Homo sapiens' first habitat on the planet. Fridell consistently gets right to the heart of his subject, melding scientific, forensic, and historic information in an easy-to-grasp, often eye-opening fashion. Roger Leslie - Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Fingerprinting Methods

DNA and RNA fingerprinting based on arbitrarily primed PCR provides the most powerful tool for the study of genes.
The basic techniques are described in detailed protocols including each step from template preparation to fingerprint visualization. Various protocols for the basic techniques allow to choose between alternative strategies. In addition to the general techniques specific research applications of particular interest are given such as gene mapping, detection of somatic mutations, gene abnormally expressed in tumors or differentially expressed genes by RNA fingerprinting.
 

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