A forensic scientist has shared the chilling reason she’d never allow her children to have braces.
Professor Dame Sue Black, 61, is one of the world’s leading anatomists and has worked on a number of high-profile criminal cases – so it’s fair to say she knows a thing or two about identifying bodies.
Now the author of Written in Bone and All That Remains has spoken about how her career has impacted the way she’s brought up her daughters Beth, 38, Grace, 27 and Anna, 25.
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Sue says: “I’ve always advocated strongly against braces because I felt that imperfect teeth were more reliable for identification purposes should it ever be required.
“I frowned on their tattoos but in reality, I was being a hypocrite as they too help us to identify people.”
Sue adds: “[My children] grew up exposed to my work and knowing that they were my glorified little laboratory rats. I would retain their baby teeth so that I could analyse them in a research project to look at age determination.
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“I would let an MRI scan be done of their knees so that I could see how much growth they might still expect in a project about football injuries. I would take their photo every year on their birthday, not merely as a memento of their childhood, but really so that I could study the growth of their face as it changed shape to accommodate the eruption of their adult teeth.”
Speaking about her unusual career path, Sue admits there are grisly elements to it and that it’s not for everyone.
“It is true that it can be a grim job where one day you may be examining the bones of a deceased person scattered across a hillside,” she explains. “And then in another you are exhuming the bodies of those shot and tortured, from a mass grave associated with war crimes investigations.
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“People often ask me how I cope with the harrowing nature of our work and how I manage to compartmentalise my work from my family.
“A senior police officer once gave me invaluable advice in this regard. He said, ‘Don’t own the guilt. You didn’t cause this and you couldn’t have stopped it. You just need to do your job – find the evidence, retrieve it, analyse it and then present it’.
“And that is so true. It is neither my job to find the culprit nor to decide on their guilt – that is the domain of the police and the courts respectively.”
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Sue adds that it can be ‘difficult to remain entirely detached’ after working on gruesome crime scenes, adding: “Justice requires the scientist to be unbiased and dispassionate and I feel that I was lucky to be introduced to my subject gradually.”
Explaining further, Sue recalls: “From the age of about five, I would follow my father when he went out shooting and would think nothing of helping him to carry back rabbits or pheasants.
“Then we would sit at the back door of our home where he patiently taught me how to skin or pluck them so that my mother could cook them.
“Then when I was about 12 I took up a Saturday job in a butcher’s shop because it seemed like a natural progression to still be surrounded by blood, bone, muscle and viscera. So perhaps it is no surprise that when I went to university I found my passion in the department of anatomy.
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“Although the animal was different, the techniques of dissection and the basic form of the structures in front of me, were still the same.
“From there, it was a simple step into the world of forensic anthropology and the work on war crimes investigations, mass fatality events and murder."
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Sue adds: “My daughters have not chosen to follow in my footsteps which is perhaps not surprising, but each of them has chosen a pathway that echoes from the world of either anatomy or the courtroom. My oldest is a sports physio, my middle is a nurse and my youngest a trainee solicitor.
“I hope that I might inspire some young people to think about forensic science as a possible career for them to follow.”
Prof. Dame Sue Black will give the 2022 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures which will be broadcast on BBC Four and iPlayer between Christmas and New Year.
The Tyla Team