Right so...

I didn't bring munchkins to my class today because I was late and had no money on me. No time to stop at the bank so there was no bribing them with food.

I had nothing to say about my stupid article. I mean, what can you say, they found a dead guy trapped in the dam at the Seine, they presumed he was dead for 3 years because he had the i.d. on him of a guy who had been missing for three years. Okay, dead for three years, maybe. Or maybe he's been wandering around for 3 years and just fell in the river and croaked. Whatever right? His head and hands are missing, obviously someone doesn't want us to I.D. him, but leaves his i.d. in his pocket? But we can't talk about any of that good juicy stuff, or the fact that he's about one year into suponification (uh, okay, so he's been in the water 3 years according to them but there's actual muscle there to be suponified...uh huh). No this is molecular forensics so what we talk about is that they did dna testing on the sternocleidomastoid (which they do using the second stupidest method possible and turn up nothing not even mDNA) and on the clavicle. They don't say why they chose the clavicle. Whatever. So instead of all the juicy bits I have to talk for an hour about how they decalcified the crushed clavicle and then ran PCR-STR analysis and realized that it WAS INDEED the guy who's id was with the body.

So basically I spent an hour saying that these people were stupid for running QUIAAMP, which by the way, they spelled wrong throughout the article, instead of using Dextran Blue which would have avoided all the same chemicals the silicon tubes avoided while saving all the time they took to do 3 washes.

I also somehow worked in some fascinating stuff about getting modern DNA off of ancient DNA when you're working with 2000 year old bones. It had nothing to do with my article, but it was interesting and sucked up time.

The fun thing is, Nelson thought I did a great job, he loved that I found a faster/better way they could have run the crap.

I spent ZERO time on this and still came out smelling like...well, better than the guy in the Seine I'm betting.

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