Kathy Reichs and the Paleo-DNA Laboratory in Thunder Bay

Aside from looking like an idiot on the beach trying to view my laptop… I have a few academic interests (wink).

I happen to love the books that Kathy Reichs gives to the world. I read everything she writes (and have for a long time) and I find her writing VERY prolific (wink). Kathy has been writing about forensic science since long, long before forensic science became such a buzz on television. I have learned so many interesting things that I would NEVER know otherwise, (example: blood splatters, trajectory, grids of string for digging/sifting, the complex nature of serrated objects, and that people can do some really, really, really bad shit).


(Above)
Kathy Reichs
Photo Credit: Kathy Reichs (merci)

She is a New York Times best-selling author. Kathy is also a full-time, practicing forensic anthropologist (North Carolina and Quebec), a university professor, a lecturer/presenter, an instructor to the FBI, and she sits on various boards in various capacities. Oh, she has a TV show based on the main character of her books now too. You may be familiar with the show Bones (This fall: Tuesdays – 8:00 eastern on Fox). Well, if you watch the show… read the books. If you read the books… watch the show. Frankly, it’s quite difficult to be anything other than completely and utterly awestruck by her books, her Web-site, her accomplishments, her contributions, and her mind. (The information in this paragraph comes from my little head but I did consult Kathy’s official Web-site for accuracy… hope everything is OK… not exactly having the ‘luckiest’ of days here).

In her book Cross Bones she makes reference to the Paleo-DNA Laboratory of Lakehead University (named for it’s geographical situation at the head of Lake Superior) and specializes in human mitochondrial DNA analysis. Thunder Bay is quite pleased that Kathy has given the lab international exposure on a different level.

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Paleo-DNA Laboratory (Lakehead University), Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada

Photo taken directly from the Paleo-DNA Laboratory

While I am not personally familiar with this lab I did visit their Web-site to learn that they are a state-of-the-art facility and a world leader in several areas. God, I can’t believe I’m going to try to reproduce here the little bit I’ve gathered! Here goes. They specialize in extracting DNA from degraded and even ancient substances (old chewing gum instead of ‘fresh-out-of-the-killer’s-mouth-with-witnesses’ chewing gum). While I believe I know the difference between mitochondrial DNA and nuclear DNA, I’m not sure what Ancient DNA is though… maybe I’ll have to poke around that site a little more.

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Hard at work at the Paleo-DNA Laboratory (Lakehead University), Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada

Photo taken from: Lakehead University

It’s neat and a very big deal for a small city to appear in a New York Times Bestseller (not exactly an everyday occurrence… and I know how I felt when George Clooney made a one-line reference to Newfoundland in The Perfect Storm). It’s awesome! We have many fine, world-class institutions here in Canada that nobody (even us Canadians) has ever even heard of. Someone said to me in February, “They’ll close Newfoundland schools when Newfoundlanders are curling for an Olympic gold medal… but they couldn’t care less when there is a medical breakthrough at McGill”. We do have fine institutions and we should exalt them. Oh, and Brad Gushue is awesome! Made history by being the leader of the first Newfoundland group to represent Canada in an Olympic Games (Men’s Curling – 2006 Winter Games – Torino, Italy) and indeed win a gold medal. I digress.

I spoke to a proud (probably the proudest – wink) citizen of Thunder Bay yesterday and he told me he had just finished Cross Bones (and that he reads all Kathy’s books), he told me about the lab and its fine work, and I thought it was all so cool and definitely worth mentioning!