I’m teaching a high school forensic science class. So far we have learned a lot of basic techniques such as developing latent fingerprints (dusting, iodine, and super glue), handwriting analysis, blood (splatter analysis, luminol, kastle-meyer) chromatography, etc. We will soon be learning DNA.
I would like to watch some CSI-type shows with them but I am not familiar with any. Which ones have the most science content? Note that I did not say the best science content. Even if it was bad science it will give us something to discuss.
Gore is note really a problem. It’s a small group of seniors who love the blood and guts stuff.
From what I remember, the New York show is the most grounded in reality, though of course all of the spinoffs don’t show the boring bits of “waiting for the mass spec to finish and spit out a bunch of lines for the analyst to interpret”.
For sheer entertainment value, Miami all the way. David Caruso chewing the scenery is the most awesome thing that’s ever awesomed.
Bones - early on - was pretty specific - maybe not always accurate - but atleast tried to stay true in story.
Same for CSI - no bloody Miami or New York - in the first few seasons - Grissom’s bug analysis always seemed atleast well told - find the episode with the wife beater and the pig - there was another where he had to rebut a different scientist - seems the process was dead on what needed to happen.
Another vote for CSI NY. I’m a low-level science geek but I’m not particularly interested in forensics, and it is the one procedural (???) crime drama where i learn something almost every week.
From what I have seen of these shows, the “science” they show has more in common with magic than with real science, and they make extensive use of advanced technology that does not actually exist.
If you plan to use them in education, be ready to tell your students that almost all the science they show is either outright fantasy, or else presented very misleadingly (usually as being a lot easier to do, and lot more definitive in its results, than its real-world equivalent, if there even is one).
Bones (a show which I enjoy, BTW, but largely because it is so stylized and unreal) also presents its scientist heroes (particularly, but not only, the lead character) as weird autistic genius freaks, quite unlike ordinary people. I should imagine that its likely effect on the young and impressionable would be to deter them from any interest in pursuing a scientific career.
I don’t think that’s accurate. I’m sure there are instances where the science is completely bogus, but as a general rule, the most these shows do is go somewhat past the limits of what science can currently do. The ‘zoom and enhance’ meme referenced above is the most egregious example I can think of. More often, I think they are pretty close to the truth.
If you want to argue about what is and is not realistic, I would focus on the idea that any crime lab anywhere would have some of the equipment that they show. I can’t think of a good example, but it’s sort of like showing a lab that has a 1/4 mile diameter particle accelerator on their back lot just so they can generate synchrotron radiation.
I find it difficult to watch forensic and medical shows. I remember one House where they do a “cognitive scan,” that of course displays an image on the monitor of what the patient is thinking. :rolleyes:
I don’t if I saw that episode, but there is an fMRI (functional MRI) that can see which parts of the brain are active during certain operations. For example you can see if someone finds a photo of a face to be familiar or not. There have even been experiments where, based on prior observation of brain activity, they can even tell when you are thinking of a particular object. I might have the details wrong, but that description should be pretty close.
There’s some debate about how much an fMRI can tell you since it really observes blood flow not actual neural activity - using blood flow as a proxy essentially. There’s also a time delay between the neural activity and the increased blood flow.
I don’t know what they purported to show, but an fMRI can do something akin to mind reading. If that’s what happened, then it would be an example of their stretching what is actually possible without presenting something that is completely bogus and with no basis in reality.
Most science? Tough.
CSIs are good. Standard disclamers are that all the science happens way too fast, the “squints” really don’t go racing around with weapons and making arrests, some of science doesn’t exist in small departments, etc…
Bones - see above but the show does have the hottest females.
NCIS - only part of the show is science, the characters are a little flakey.
You can see a half-dozen of each on any given night on cable. Entertaining fluff for the most part. CSI takes itself more seriously with the exception of the over-the-top Miami Vice spin-off.
True, but not what the episode was showing. To clarify, I meant that the episode actually had a computer monitor that showed what the person was thinking at the time, with images and everything. fMRI could theoretically show you that they were thinking about faces or body parts or places, but it could not be translated to a visual image. ISTR that they made the resulting image degraded or colored strangely somehow. And anyway, this would not be something you would use in a clinical setting, although perhaps that’s irrelevant as the conceit of the show is the unorthodox ways House gets results.
There is something called retinotopic mapping in at least area V1 of the visual cortex. The 3d image seen by the eyes is translated onto the surface of the brain, albeit distorted because not all parts of the visual field are given equal weight.
However, fMRI is not powerful enough to see this with any detail. The resolution of a voxel goes down to IIRC 1 cm^3, hardly enough to be seen as anything but a blurry image. The original studies used I believe macaques and can’t be used in humans for ethical reasons.
Well, in that case, you have a point. I think I would have remembered that one so I probably didn’t see it. A cubic centimeter is a pretty huge volume though so for fMRI to be useful in any way I would expect the resolution to be significantly better than that. I think MRI’s in general can be used for angiography. If so, then I would guess we’re talking about less than a cubic millimeter, and even that is on the gross side as imaging standards go. I should probably go and try to look it up. Maybe later.
I actually have some familiarity with the primary scientific literature on this stuff, and I can tell you that both fMRI in general, and experiments of the sort you are referring to have been hugely and very misleadingly over-hyped in scientific journalism, press releases and the like, and sometimes even in the abstracts of the actual papers in the peer reviewed literature. (And then, of course, when it gets put in a fictional TV crime show, the exaggeration generally gets taken up several more notches, out of the realm of heavy spin and into the realms of outright fantasy.) Lots of scientists are very far from satisfied that all the kinks have been worked out of the fMRI technique (and the very complex statistical analysis that has to be applied to the raw data to get anything meaningful out of it). But, quite apart from that, these “mind reading” experiments are much, much less impressive, when looked at closely, than they have been made to appear.
They tend to go more or less as follows. First of all you take lots and lots of fMRI images of a subject looking at one sort of stimulus, under very carefully controlled conditions; then you take lots more images of the same guy looking at another stimulus under the same very carefully controlled conditions, and maybe repeat for 3 or 4 more stimuli. You feed all the data into your computer. (Actually it has been in the computer all along: raw fMRI data is completely uninterpretable without heavy statistical massaging, which eventually gets you those nice pretty colored pictures of brains.) Then you present your subject with one or other of the stimuli (under the same very carefully controlled conditions, of course) and you have the computer figure out, from the fMRI image now produced, and the data collected earlier, which of the previously presented stimuli he is now looking at. If you did everything just right, your computer will be able to guess which of the original stimuli he is currently looking at at significantly better than chance levels.
Bingo! You have a two page article in Nature or Science (you deserve it because what you did was so technically tricky, not because you have made any significant direct contribution to our understanding of the brain), and you just significantly increased your chances of getting out of the postdoc ghetto and into a tenure-track job. Your university PR department puts out a press release about how its scientists have developed a technique for reading minds (this sort of stuff helps a lot with getting government and foundation grants and contributions from philanthropists). Print and internet science journalists rewrite the press release, maybe juicing it up a bit to attract more readers, and publish their stories. Scriptwriters for TV shows read these stories, and figure that, with a good application of poetic licence, they can fit something like this into a nice entertaining plot, which they proceed to do.
