"It's Analytical My Dear Watson|" promises participants an intense multi-disciplinary experience in forensic chemistry, scientific ethics, psychology, criminalistics, and criminology. A group of fifteen junior and senior high school students will be selected with the assistance of local high school science teachers and counselors and will reflect the ethnic, racial, and economic composition of rural communities on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. The Forensic Science Project will meet on the campus of Washington College for a two week summer residential program. A staged crime constitutes our opening statement. Our expert in eyewitness testimony and the effects of discredited witnesses on jurors will lead students through a description of the crime and the difficulties and ethical problems posed by their flawed perception of the event. Lecture sessions will provide the theory of "wet" and instrumental analytical methods and pose the chemical and criminal puzzles, but more time will be spend in the laboratory. We will begin with fingerprinting and blood typing working up to the use of the Chemistry Departments's phalanx of research grade instrumentation. These high schoolers will gather data for the growing Chemical Analytical Network, a computer simulation in Forensic Chemistry at Washington College. We will visit crime and environmental laboratories where these young, open minds can observe potential role models working in exciting and rewarding fields. A representative of the Walters Art Gallery will speak to fakes and forgeries in the art world as demonstrated in a recent exhibit there. The course will build to a trial in which students will serve as expert witnesses, attempting to convince the judge and jury of the correctness of their forensically gathered evidence.
