I met Dr. Budowle when we were both, and as we still are, serving on the DNA Advisory Board and I was assigned the task of drafting the by-laws. And I will say not too many people were interested in that, but Bruce Bodowle was, and he read it carefully, called me, sent comments, checked my draft against the federal statute and against federal rules and made enormous corrections in it, and I was very thankful. And so I assumed that he was a lawyer, and no greater compliment could be paid in my household than to call somebody a lawyer. With a fine analytical mind, and with a love of the language, and a very, very careful reader.

I then found out that his doctorate was a Ph.D. in genetics and that is second in my house. My son and I are the lawyers and my husband is the Ph.D. in genetics.

Doctor Budowle joined the FBI in 1983 and he has been spending, and maybe it is this week he is at the Forensic Science Research and Training Center at the FBI Academy. That's what you do, it's called Club Fed.

DR. BUDOWLE: Yes.

CHIEF JUSTICE ABRAHAMSON: All right. He has authored over 200 publications. He has testified many times, approximately 60, and that's more times than he ever wanted to testify. In the late 1980s, he was chiefly responsible for developing DNA methodologies that were so robust that they could be transferred to state and local laboratories without extraordinary or sensitive technological equipment. Because of his thoughtful, streamlined approach to technology transfer issues, state and local laboratories were able to perform DNA testing on criminal evidence and independently present these results in court.

He has been instrumental in virtually every aspect of forensic DNA analysis since that time, and every time I see him, which is several times a year, when we are not talking about the Antarctic, which we have both visited, we talk about how he is going to be on one or more of these working task forces to help us.

He is also Vice Chair of the DNA Advisory Board, substituting when Dr. Lederberg is not there, and so I am delighted that he agreed to be our luncheon speaker, and delighted that he will continue to work with us.

Bruce, I still think you're a lawyer.

DR. BUDOWLE: Thank you, mom. I think we have a problem here, the power actually isn't hooked up. That will be fine.

I thought what I would do here is sort of give an eclectic presentation because we have a wide group of people here with a lot of different experiences. Some of you have street experience, some are lawyers. I am not sure I am going to take that as a compliment, that you thought of me as a lawyer, but some have some scientific background, some have not been exposed to any of this, so I am going to give you a little bit of the science, a little bit of history, a little philosophy, some opinions, try to put it together so that you get a taste of some of the things that have happened.

So what I thought we could do is just start off with the idea of forensic science DNA, and I am going to make this a high tech presentation also, so when we have technology transfer, you can start thinking of how we can do some of this.

I think any time we are going to do a DNA presentation we should start off with a time line so you can have some idea of how much has happened in what short time it actually has happened. We should start off -- no DNA talk should start off without having a double helix back in the early '50s, the year I was born. Jim, I'm sorry. A little before, just a little.

Restriction enzymes in the early '70s, the ability to cut DNA into fragments at specific places was -- enabled us to use this technology later on. Mid-'70s, southern blotting, the ability to take these fragments and put them in a -- on a support, what looks like a piece of paper to you non-scientists, so we could produce patterns that could be reviewed.

VNTRs, these genetic markers, which I will show in a minute, I put down two arrows, 1980 and 1985, because of the significance each has in forensics. 1980, Ray White at the Howard Hughes at the Medical Institute was the first one to describe a VNTR sequence. But in 1985 the work of Al Jeffries is what really pushed forward the emphasis in the forensic community. So we should give credit to both.

PCR, this technique where we can take small sub- analytical quantities of DNA, put it in a test tube and, within a relatively short time of an hour or two hours, produce analytical quantities that can be tied to it in a manner that is much easier than it would have been without that technique.

And then the forensic science interests, and I might say that around the mid-'80s, most people give credit to the British. They were the first, with Al Jeffries, to do the work. The others actually, in my history lesson there, it was the life cultures actually doing in first, and then I believe the home office was next. Then there was a PCR case and then you saw a lot of the other work. The FBI was -- began some research in 1986 and we have been there ever since.

CODIS and TWGDAM both got their birth around late '80s and early 1990, where there was an emphasis of trying to bring the community together to do the work, as opposed to individual groups just doing work of the mom and pop type or cottage industry, because we really benefit in this consortium approach.

STRs got their birth around 1991, and I put mitochondria DNA as forensic use with the FBI in the mid- 1990s. As you can see, there has been a big concentration from about 1985 to the present, where most of this work has occurred. Now, I know the Director was asked, and I wasn't asked, and I am the after-thought, but I know if the Director was here, that he would have emphasized that the FBI has been a major player in the development of DNA technology and will continue to be a major player in that technology for the future. And maybe a lot of what is done and is decided today, the character and the personality of that has its birth from the efforts of the FBI.

And the FBI, as Shirley had mentioned, was instrumental in developing robust technology. When this technology first came to forefront, it wasn't easy to do. It was an academic type of scientific research and people would tweak it, they would manipulate it. In research, you don't have to be correct all the time either, you know, you can tolerate an error or two here or there, and then you report it, then you find your error, then you publish another paper on the error, and you can perpetuate your publication list quite well by your mistakes.

Well, we can't tolerate that kind of tweaking and errors and such. We have to build things that will be able to be transferred to many laboratories, not only in the United States, but around the world, and this was actually the first real endeavor that made that possible, the FBI did that.

We also established criteria for validation reliability. We actually wrote the criteria that TWGDAM uses for validation studies. Interpretation guidelines, matches, exclusions, inclusions, the wording, the semantics, statistical methods. The first method, the fixed bin method was an FBI creation that was litigated many times, Barry. Computer software for imaging, calculations, data bases, to this day are still being developed by the FBI.

As I mentioned, TWGDAM and CODIS, again, we really want to stress this consortium approach, that bringing people together to set standards is a benefit to the community, and if you want to do something, I strongly stress this approach as part of your considerations. Validation studies, putting on symposia to bring the community together. Case work. I would say 80 to 90 percent of the FBI's casework actually is for state and local laboratories, not the federal government. Publication has been mentioned. Testimony support. I seem to spend time testifying for other people than the FBI, much to my chagrin. Consultation and I may add training.

One of the big areas that you are talking about and considering is technology transfer, building up a formal infrastructure in the community. We have trained over 500 people in various courses on DNA, and I think it is just a dent of what needs to be done.

For those who are not familiar with it, the genetic marker that was first used is known as a variable number of ten and repeat, where there is a sequence of DNA that I will call -- in this block here, that is repeated over and over again, and that the number of repeats that vary determines the size of this fragment and the differences amongst individuals. So in this case here, we have a fragment that has four repeats, here we have one that has six repeats. One is bigger than the other, and they can be separated and typed.

The arrows are those restriction enzyme sites where you cut the DNA, and I can reproducibly do that if I use proper protocols, and then afterward will generate a DNA profile where we will have reference standards. Two bands from the suspect, each band being -- the one at the top here being a larger piece with more repeats, the one under here being a smaller piece with less repeats. Compare it to the victim, which has two bands in this case, different sizes from these, so you can actually compare those then with the evidence.

And by just a visual comparison, we can see that the suspect is excluded as being a source of the material, and it matches the victim. And one can then proceed onward by doing more tests and provide more information.

Now, the DNA typing methods that we just described here is called RFLP, and it was the mainstay and still is the most robust technology to date that is being used. It is polymorphic. It is the best one, polymorphic meaning that is good for discriminating amongst individuals. It is good for elucidating contributors of a mixture. Those take a couple of weeks to develop the results, though. It does take some effort and labor, and you need a certain amount of DNA of a certain quality to get results.

If we take advantage of that PCR methodology that I briefly described, where I am going to make copies of the original target DNA, I can get faster results. With automation, it can become less labor-intensive, and use far less DNA. The DNA can be exposed to the environment and salted to some degree and yet still give results. We can have, as I said, automation. But then, again, we have to consider contamination as a more or a greater concern than we had with the RFLP methods.

So there is no perfect method. One has to understand the limitations of any method, be it PCR, RFLP, STRs, whatever. One has to understanding the limitations of technology and always work within that technology.

Now, one of the mark systems, and I am just going to give one example, this Dot Blot system, in which, in this particular case, we will have several genetic markers that have two forms, an A or a B, and that if one has a particular type, it will produce a pattern that can be read, and it can be easily determined within its limitations that a person here has the B, for this marker has A, this one got AB, a B, a B, and it's a fairly easy to interpret procedure within its own bounds.

And that many genetic marker systems can be typed using this Dot Blot kind of approach. And I am not going to go into technology, but the basis of this approach is also the same basis as much of the chip technology that was bandied about a little bit earlier today.

Now, PCR based methods that have been used predominantly in the United States to date, have been what is known as the D1S80 locis, which is a VNTR, and the amelogenin, which enables one to determine the gender of a contributor of a sample, and those DQ alphapoly markers. They are very robust within their own bounds again, but they have limitations interpreting mixtures. So, again, we do have a desire to look for additional markers that will help us with violent crimes and mixtures.

And that's where the STR markers come in. They are more informative than the polymarker DQ alpha. There are a large number of them and, with proper design, we can put many of them together into one assay and achieve a high power of discrimination with less effort than we did beforehand. So that's where most of the work is being done today.

And STR is much like a VNTR where we have repeat, except the size of the repeats was just a little smaller. But it's the same principle. But instead of cutting the DNA, as we would have before, we are going to do a PCR process. So for those who are not familiar, I thought I would actually show you how that works. The DNA is double- stranded, and by applying heat, you can break it into single strands, and each strand can then serve as a template to make a copy. And what happens is we add small pieces of DNA into the process, they bind outside of the repeat area, and then, with proper conditions, we make copies of that area. Then if we -- that would be one cycle of PCR. We apply heat to it again, we can denature them again, add in more primers and get extensions over and over.

Now, for those who are interested, if you notice, these -- this one here and this one down here, these two have very prescribed sizes that are actually dictated by the number of repeats. And in a short time, that is all we are going to see in the reaction, an exponential increase of those particular fragments. In the end, we don't see the original DNA because it is swamped by the copies that have been in vitro. And yet, if you do the work properly, you can demonstrate that the repeats themselves are faithful and the sizes can be evaluated from the product.

Okay. So we have a little bit of technology we are looking at. We are interested in now applying that. We are going to want to apply it not only in case work but, as was said this morning by Steve Niezgoda, we don't want to have technologies that -- where you are working in case work with one kind of marker system and data banking with another system. You want technology and efforts to draw it so that there is compatibility across the board, and these STRs are going to do that for CODIS, and Steve has already described that.

Now, another part of CODIS, though, is taking that resource from a consortium of individuals in the crime lab community to try to identify those markers to get a core set of loci or markers so that we can be effective.

And one thing our CODIS people did was support a project that the FBI coordinated, in a somewhat dictatorial fashion, it was not a democratic project. They were given assignments and they must report back with that. There wasn't a lot of room for playing around, because we had a goal in mind we wanted to achieve. And that was to improve the technology, to get markers that everybody would use and, at the same time, by bringing a consortium together, to raise the standard in the community, because we would be educating people in the process. Some had a long way to go to get in that process. But by the end of it, we have a lot of labs that are proficient now because of this effort.

The purpose again, select a core loci for CODIS, but not just for CODIS, but for case work analyses. And how we accomplished that was this collaborative project. These are just some of the labs, where they represent from around the country, who were involved and everybody seemed to be eager to be involved. And there was a large set of genetic markers that were looked at and tested. And we tested it in a particular way. We went and did performance tests on the markers and population data bases which are being analyzed as we speak.

The performance testing was done in several ways, because something you think about in technology transfer is who should dictate the quality of the machinery, the markers, the technology or whatever, it should be the users. And what happens is -- what happened was when we started DNA technology, we dictated the quality to the manufacturers. We dictated the protocols, what was acceptable.

But when we started going to PCR, particular STRs, we found that industry was starting to dictate what was acceptable, and that is not acceptable to us. So part of this process was to evaluate, go back to industry and say you need to improve this, you need to fix this up. Now, what's the benefit of that? We have a more robust technology that can be transferred to the state and local labs. Industry has a market, because if they have a high quality product, everybody is happy. So it actually worked out to be mutually beneficial in the process. And then, of course, the forensic validation studies, the FBI has already completed all those.

Population typing was done in this study, and I just want to put up some of the samples of what we have done so we can answer some of the questions, which do fit into the technology issue as well, because the application of statistics is a technological issue. But we want to address that, and we always want to address that, to take that up as an issue up front, so we know what the limitations are and what to do. Based on the recommendations of the NRC II report, we can use what is appropriate for application.

The core loci actually through this effort had been decided and there are 13 of them, so that we can actually look at a profile and get a high degree of discrimination and probably uniqueness in this situation, even for a relative. And I guess the closest relative we will consider in this case, other than the identical twin, which we won't consider, is the brother scenario, and we can discriminate quite effectively here with these -- these markers.

Also, and I will bring this up in the sense of comparably -- in a minute -- comparability. One thing for people to understand is, is that we also have to be practical. It is the requirement to be a CODIS user that you will attempt all 13 of these markers on case work, because we want that high power of discrimination. But note where it says attempt, because we know there is a reality here and that case work will have limitations and not all markers will be typable. So one thing we have to decide here, what is the minimum number that will be allowable for CODIS to enter case work profiles? But it won't be all 13 in every case.

However, for the following data base, all 13 will have to be typed, because we want that high discrimination. So we have -- when someone identifies a profile, the turnaround time is quick, the provisional hits are small, and with a large number of markers, we can resolve mixtures more effectively and have a very valuable data base.

We -- our counterparts in England don't enter up mixtures on their data bank because of the -- they only use a limited number of markers compared to what we have, about half. We want to enter mixtures in there because they are valuable information. If we can resolve them, that would be beneficial.

I should say that when we take charge of the technology and we define the markers, then we also push industry to meet our needs. If we don't, industry isn't going to do that. Both manufacturers, and this gets into the patent issue, which we discuss -- because I have my own opinions on that. There are two manufacturers that have access to, or the rights currently to generate kits for STRs. And those manufacturers are not going to have the exact same reagents between them, and that is an issue that has to be considered, and they didn't have the same markers between them, but by redefining it, they are now moving in that direction.

For instance, one of the manufacturers had nine of the 13 markers in a particular kit, and they have now manufacturer, are producing a second kit to accommodate all 13. So we are able to drive industry based on a definition. The same with the other manufacturer, had eight, and is building a new kit with some internal controls to assure higher quality. So we have a real effect.

I'll just mention the British. One, I may say they use less, but every marker they have that they use routinely, are in our core set. So, therefore, we can have compatibility and communication and sharing internationally which would be advantageous, from a data base value to some odd cases, I would say.

So the real benefit is that the community has played a direct role in developing these systems. They have grown up with it, they have better experience. And they dictated the criteria for what is considered acceptable.

They effected the changes to improve the performance in the kits, so now when people get these kits, they are going to perform at a higher level than would have been otherwise. We have expedited the commercial availability of these kits. By defining the criteria, manufacturers are moving because they have a pathway to go. They know what to follow to get there. And if you have better kits and better robust technology, you can streamline the interpretational guidelines so that we can avoid some of the interpretational difficulties that might have occurred previously.

So what did we get out of this? We get implementation by the FBI, implementation by state and local labs, increased utilization of CODIS. So, again, this consortium concept is what brings that forward, built that infrastructure, and as any concept of technology transfer, it should really be thought of in the consortium and infrastructure building as just -- as opposed to just a quick fix of throwing money into buying equipment.

Now, another technology is DNA sequencing where we can actually read the letters code of a stretch of DNA. Now, traditionally, the way that was done, and I have separated them out here, is that it was done by radioactive detections so all the banks looked black, so we had to use four different lanes on a gel, which means it took up four times the space to do a typing. And one could read it by, if this was A and this was G, this was C and that was T, read the A first and then you would say here's a C, a C, an A, and you read up the ladder, and it was an arduous process. But with the advent of flourescent technology and so forth, and you add in the colors, it makes it easier.

I know when there's -- where red or blue, you know, yellows and greens are, and I can merge them into one lane so I can improve my efficiency and I can use automated readers to detect that. So that when I have -- oops -- so that when I have an actual analysis, I can just run one lane, I can run the evidence, and I can compare them, and wherever there is a difference, I can evaluate that and proceed forward. Again, nothing is new in the way that one does forensic comparisons, we are just using some of the technology to facilitate that.

I bring up the DNA sequencing because that is the methodology of choice currently for doing the typing of mitochondrial DNA.

Now mitochondrial DNA is slightly different than the DNA we've been talking about up to this point, because it's outside the nucleus, and it's only inherited by the mother. Now if you remember on the first couple of slides I showed two bands for the suspect, two for the victim, two for the evidence. You don't get that situation generally from mitochondria, because you inherit it from your mother. The father does not contribute the DNA. And that has implications in interpretation as well.

The advantage of mitochondrial DNA is that there are many more copies of it in a cell than there is of this nuclear DNA. We have two copies of the nuclear DNA. We can have hundreds to thousands of the mitochondrial DNA. So cases that have been exposed to the environment longer or are older or whatever or a very limited amount of DNA, we have a better chance of typing them with the mitochondrial DNA than we do with nuclear DNA, such as a hair shaft and so forth.

The main area where it has a great value has been in hairs, bones, and teeth, and, I mean, we use it at the FBI a majority of the cases with hair, some with bones, and you're going to see a great value in this in the future to resolve some of those cases.

It has polymorphic value in that it can discriminate amongst individuals, but we had some discussion earlier about six nuclear markers being one in a bazillion or whatever that number would be. You do not have that power of discrimination.

However, there are some situations where this is more powerful than the nuclear DNA. With the nuclear DNA we compare with close relatives such as brother to brother, son to father, maybe even to a maternal grandmother or a paternal grandfather or something, but after that it breaks down quickly. With the maternal -- with mitochondrial DNA, because it's maternally inherited, any maternal relative can be compared that can be quite distant from the individual being considered at that particular point, the example being the czar's bones that were found was actually compared several generations away to royalty in England who's living today to make that comparison. So there are situations where this would be far more informative than any test around. So one has to understand when it can be used and what it can be used for, and use it appropriately.

I mentioned the heteroplasmy because this is an issue that is arising now not for any reason other than one might expect, other than the fact to consider is that some individuals carry more than one type. In fact, every individual carries more than one type, but some can be detected and some cannot. And one has to consider that in the interpretation issues and so forth.

Okay. You've got your taste of technology. We always have to remember a lot of things that have happened in the past can be learned from that your committee can use, so you don't try to just do things again because you think it's a good idea at the moment. It's actually been probably addressed already.

There have been a lot of previous issues that came up, and population statistics and data bases. We have an NRC report No. 2, 1996, because of population statistics, addressing everything from assumption of independence, specific population issues, applications, validation studies.

No matter what anybody decides here, no matter what you say, it will be good enough for somebody, and it won't be good enough for somebody else. That's the nature of the system, and we have to accept that, and that will continue.

Contamination. It can be utterly devastating in some cases, and can be ignored because of the use in another situation. You can see some concern post-convictions, maybe not taking as great a concern about it as it might be in let's say the O. J. Simpson case. It's not going to go away. Potential error, I heard some discussion we're going to address errors and legal issues on errors. I can't imagine why. But it's there, it's been discussed, it's been addressed. And bias. Jim Crow mentioned some of that, and I'll bring that up in a minute.

In population genetics, this was addressed -- this was actually probably a vehement discussion, to be nice about it, for a number of years, the data have been collected. They are consistent with the history. I'd just like to show a couple for STRs, and I bring up the African American, because one of the early critics said that African American data bases could never be collected because the variation would be so great and it could never be done.

All data to date says that's not a problem. Here is just some histograms of African Americans from the United States and where the peaks are going to be relative to frequencies for the particular forms of this STR compared to those from the Bahamas, those Africans from Trinidad, to those from Jamaica. Now they're all different groups, they're ethnically distinct, they're culturally distinct, they have their own subdivision characteristics, yet for the practical consideration if you chose any one of those data bases, you wouldn't get an estimate that would be substantially different. This is consistent with our findings.

The same with other genetic markers. I just put this one up and you can't see it from the back there, but we have things like Caucasians compared to African Americans to Japanese to Italians and Turks. The Caucasians are all similar to each other. The Africans are similar to each other. The Asians are similar to each other. But they are different compared to each other, one another. And that's consistent, and we will have that data so we don't go through these issues again as much.

Bias perspective. I'd like bring that up, because Jim Crow was discussing this a little bit, I think he was alluding to it, is there's an argument about bias perspective, the working for law enforcement and, you know, you're just cops in white coats, and that's something that comes up. And I think part of that one has to take into consideration that's an adversary system, and there is an adversary system, and there's no getting around it. That's the way it is. We need to accept that and work in that framework and go forward.

Because let's look at the bias in a sense. When there's exclusions, I don't see people coming up and saying I disagree with that, I want my client to go through the court test anyway because of the exclusion. Bias is raised to an ideal standard. So when we have inclusions, you frame something in the adversary setting, where one side is -- you've got a biased sampling. You're only looking at those cases where you failed to exclude and you're moving forward. And that's just the reality of the system.

So when you think of an inclusion, you are ignoring all the other data that's been collected, and you have to take that into consideration. But once an inclusion occurs, the adversary system comes into play, and it's their job to attack it. One person -- the person being attacked may not like it, but that's the fact, and that's the way it is, and ultimately the adversary system has a benefit that I see in the United States over the rest of the world is that the standard is higher in the United States. There's not -- it's not a negative thing the adversary system exists, but when you consider these discussions you had this morning, let's remember that that exists there and everything we do is biased, what we're looking at at the moment.

I put this one up here about the telepathic modulation. That's a term actually coined by Joshua Lederberg, because he's the only one that can use those big words like that and make sense out of it. But the data can be reviewed. People can't make the bands migrate by thought into a position. The dots appear by position. One of the advantages we have today is that there is far more documentation than ever before. High technology drives more documentation, makes it available for review, and that means also that's that specter for people as well. And I think that's driving a higher standard, and I think far less of this bias issue than before.

And then retesting, which has been advocated. I'm a strong believer in retesting, that if there is a question, let's go ahead and resolve it in the best way as opposed to arguing there might have been a mistake, there could have been a mistake, and that could be a real value. Because if you do that, you know, it can be very happy there. You didn't see that did you? Watch this. This is a happy person, so --

Now to close up, I talk a little about the future, and some of the things that are going to happen. Let's keep in mind in the future the adversary system will still be there, and no amount of wishing of you to change the legal rules of evidence or whatever is going to change. That's not going to change. It's going to be there. We're advocates of it. We don't want to see it go away. Okay. So everything's framed around that.

And why is that important? Because as new techniques come in, not everybody is going to accept to use it, because the older techniques that are well established have been through the courts, they've been through the challenges, they can rely on that, and there's going to be a desire to gravitate towards that as opposed to the new technologies, even though they sound better and they offer you more. You have to keep that in consideration when you start saying well, let's just move ahead.

Routine use. Yes, we're going to see far more use of it for human identification, we're going to see it for maybe plants, drug identification, a whole set of areas that haven't been considered yet, and in a lot of difficult ones. We talk about profiling of individuals. I don't know where it's going to go, but that is going to be one of those ethics issues as well.

Felon data bases. Felon data bases are going to drive the technology in this community, because it's going to be the throughput in automation that is going to be the greatest concern for people. And once the felon data base is in place, then they're going to want to start using it. The automation, again driven by the felon data bases, is where most of the effort's going to be going for the next two to five years.

Resource needs. Training and equipment obviously, you know, I don't think we need a lot of committee work to say we need more of that. But that alone is not enough, and if you think you just throw money in and get equipment and that's going to do the job, then I think there's a real problem, because we can get a lot of equipment in, we can do a lot more cases, but unless you have people report those cases and go in court and endure all the hardships and whatever it is they go through, it doesn't matter, there's a bottleneck. There has to be an infrastructure of people who are highly educated, who are going to take high tech and become high-tech people. So if you're going to invest, that's where we have to go from the ground up.

I mentioned personnel. And nonsuspect cases. Again, I think that that is going to drive it, because what's the use of creating a data base if you're not going to solve the cases where you don't have a suspect? So what I try to do in this time here is give you a little bit of a taste of a lot of different things from a little bit of opinion there, I don't believe anything I said, so I'm still objective at this point, and if there's any questions, I'll take them now.

Thank you.

[Applause.]

CHIEF JUSTICE ABRAHAMSON: Any questions? Phil?

DR. REILLY: Bruce, this is a little bit tangential to your presentation, a question that came up I shared with the Chair at lunch.

What discussions, if any, I'm sure you've had some, have you had about coordinating this effort with Canada and Mexico in particular, given the common border we share. We often talk about cold hits across State lines. This must equally be true across those two borders.

DR. BUDOWLE: Well, we've spent most of our effort with Canada, because they do have the infrastructure in place to do that, and Mexico is not quite up there with these particular markers yet. There is a resource problem they have. But with Canada, they were part of our CODIS working group, intentionally, and they're also part of TWGDAM. And that's been that way since the beginning, because we do believe we have common borders and concerns. So they have adopted the same concepts, the same markers, to proceed forward.

DR. REILLY: Any special evidentiary problems because of different systems of law that you know of?

DR. BUDOWLE: Evidentiary problems? I haven't addressed that per se. I mean, we're just dealing with this as a technical problem per se, what happens after that. Although they seem to inherit, you know, sort of like that big United States and little Canada kind of scenario. They inherit our problems, but on a more civil level than we endure.

Barry.

PROFESSOR SCHECK: I was intrigued by your comment concerning mitochondrial DNA that everybody is heteroplasmic, it's just that it can't necessarily be detected. Could you explain a little bit of what you mean by that?

DR. BUDOWLE: Well, I can't go into a biology class here, but remember, there are thousands of mitochondria per cell, and the replication of the mitochondria to make new cells or new mitochondrial DNA is less stringent than the process that's done at the nuclear DNA level. So there are chances for errors that can be tolerated in the replication. In other words, you don't get a faithful copy all the time.

So if I were to go in and be able to pluck out any single one, I might find one that has a base -- a letter different than another, but when I look at thousands of them at one time, I can't see it. But there are some individuals -- well, look at a thousand molecules. One may be different. You just can't see that. It's not even noise in the background. It's undetectable. But there are some individuals that have a higher population of another type in their bodies, and it can be -- they can carry two types, either in the same cell or in different cells. And when I say different, I don't mean that I have a type that's so dramatically different that it would -- I would confuse two people. It's usually like one letter different in the DNA code.

CHIEF JUSTICE ABRAHAMSON: Thank you on behalf of all of us for spending a day here and for his contribution at lunch, and not only of his own personal contribution, but the contributions of the FBI and the FBI laboratories in this. It was a thoughtful and creative talk, and we appreciate that.

Our schedule -- we're going to continue with the agenda, but our schedule's going to be somewhat at the mercy of the Attorney General's schedule. She was delayed in Atlanta, but she will be here later in the afternoon. So we'll proceed with a postconviction task force, and our speaker will be Professor Margaret Berger of Brooklyn Law School, who's the author of a very prominent textbook on evidence, and she's had two successful sessions already. Judge Reinstein would ordinarily have introduced her, and he's attended both those meetings, but family matters kept him from being here today.

So, Professor Berger, if you would take over. Thank you.

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