LIsa Black
Cape Coral, FL
Female, 49
I spent the five happiest years of my life in a morgue. As a forensic scientist in the Cleveland coroner’s office I analyzed gunshot residue on hands and clothing, hairs, fibers, paint, glass, DNA, blood and many other forms of trace evidence, as well as crime scenes. Now I'm a certified latent print examiner and CSI for a police department in Florida. I also write a series of forensic suspense novels, turning the day job into fiction. My books have been translated into six languages.
For homework interview questions, please email me at lisa-black@live.com.
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No, I've never regretted it. And your job title is whatever your agency says it is, so 'forensic scientist' and 'csi' can mean different things in different agencies, so you can certainly be both. the first implies you work mostly in the lab and the second implies you work mostly in the field, but depending on the size of the agency and any specialization you have, you might do both equally or they might be completely separate.
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Almost certainly, no. Unlike television, real forensic equipment is designed to test for certain things. For example the mass spectrometer in the toxicology department is set to test for illegal narcotics and not heavy metals such as arsenic. If arsenic is suspected, it could be detected with a different instrument or different parameters programmed into the same instrument. So I doubt there is any equipment that could be set up to detect microscopic amounts of photographic chemicals, if a photo would even shed any.
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We don't have a set schedule for interns. They'll come in on weekdays, but other than that we work with their school/work schedule.
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Audiologist
Can just one loud concert do serious damage to your ears?
Birthday Party Clown
OK seriously, how DOES the clown car thing work?
Call Center Employee (Retail)
Which cable company do you think has the absolute worst customer service?
They’re all shocking, in their way, But there hasn’t been one in particular that bowled me over.
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I don’t know what you mean by that.
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Huh, that's a good question. I hope my books show what it's really like, except, of course, that my protagonist spends much more time out of the lab than in it, which is not at all realistic.
The non-fiction TV shows and books show reality, however, you have to remember that they're presenting cases that most investigators may come across once or twice in a lifetime.
Fiction shows, like "CSI" in which they have computerized databases of every substance in the world including toothpaste and wall paint, or ones in which female pathologists wear cocktail dresses to work. are definitely not realistic at all.
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