Liebig taught the world two great lessons. The first was that in order to teach chemistry it was necessary that students should be taken into a laboratory. The second lesson was that he who is to apply scientific thought and method to industrial problems must have a thorough knowledge of the sciences. The world learned the first lesson more readily than it learned the second. -Ira Remsen1
I recently ran across a 2012 issue of The CAC News, the newsletter of the California Association of Criminalists, the “regional” professional association for forensic scientists in California. In it, a colleague and friend, Greg Matheson, talks about attending one of my talks at a conference and comments about how he had an epiphany:
Beyond the statements, definitions and information Max provided in his presentation he provided me with an “ah-ha” moment which resolved, in my mind, the dichotomy which exists between the generalist and specialist concept. Issues surrounding specialists and generalists have raged in our profession throughout my entire career….For as long as I can remember, there were opposing philosophies in criminalistic laboratories—crime lab staff as a generalist vs. a specialist. In general, forensic science practitioners in California and the west coast were identified as generalists. The rest of the country identified themselves as specialists. Californians et al were accused of being generalists or criminalists who claimed to work in and have knowledge of a large number of forensic science disciplines. A derisive definition could be that a generalist is a “jack of all trades but master of none.” Specialists were described as forensic scientists hired to perform casework in a specific forensic discipline and, unless their employment status changed, they would work that discipline for the entirety of their career.
As Greg described it, this was also a point of contention about what the discipline/profession/occupation should be called. Even as far back as Paul Kirk (who translated Hans Gross’ German word kriminalistik, to describe the scientific and technical methods he espoused in crime scene analysis, into the English “criminalistic”), the question was raised in 1963:
Where is criminalistics, forensic science, or whatever it may be called, going?
“Whatever it may be called,” indeed. Kirk made criminalistics peak around 1970 but its use has waned over time. “Forensic science” hit a plateau in the early 2000s but “forensics” has become ascendant, to the chagrin of many in the profession who want to emphasize the science* in the field. Don’t get me started on CSI.
Kirk’s view was that a scientist, in Remsen’s terms, should be at the bench in a forensic laboratory; to put it bluntly, someone with a doctorate in the sciences. Kirk had worked on the Manhattan Project and was a noted biochemist in his own right. His “science-first” approach annoyed almost everyone, from the technicians then working on cases for police agencies, to the police themselves, to his colleagues at UC Davis who looked down on his “merely applied” science as demeaning police work. Nevertheless, at the time, having helped to figure out how to split an atom, analyzing textile fibers must have seemed well within science’s reach. Kirk’s view was that each forensic scientist* could handle all of the analyses that came into a police laboratory, regardless of the type of evidence.
He was naive and wrong.
As Greg further discusses,
Unfortunately, reality and evolving technology has made it increasingly difficult to maintain the concept of a forensic science generalist as it relates to a scientists assignment. As the director of the LAPD Criminalistics Laboratory it became necessary for me to at least partially abandon the concept of laboratory wide transfers of criminalists between units or sections. The increasing complexity of scientific analysis, specific coursework requirements to perform an analysis, and long training times has resulted in a necessary shift to a criminalist as a specialist. In addition, the size of the laboratory and the complexity of the work in their primary unit of assignment made it impossible to continue the practice of having all criminalists trained and ready to respond to crime scenes.
As I’ve brought before in this venue, given that anything can be evidence, the world is just too darn big and complex for one person to be able to be knowledgeable about all biological, chemical, and digital materials that may become evidence.
Do we just walk away from the idea of a generalist, then? In a discussion with Greg after my talk (I remember it distinctly as we had to be ushered from the room for the next speaker and we stood in the hallway nattering on productively for almost an hour), I made my position clearer. It wasn’t that I was against the idea of a generalist, it was that being a generalist just wasn’t practical. What being a generalist meant was, as in Remsen’s view, was that you understood what the rest of the laboratory was doing, not that you could do it yourself. To apply chemistry to an industry (and forensic science* is just that), you need to understand chemistry first. Greg’s description continues,
…it took Max’s talk to finally show me a resolution to the ongoing generalist vs. specialist debate. It is my desire that the profession seriously consider a paradigm shift in the focus of the generalist vs. specialist concept and finally embrace the reality that every forensic scientist became a generalist to improve the forensic science profession.
The way to understand and embrace the requirement and need for every forensic scientist being a generalist is to separate the practitioner’s technical assignment and their daily analytical duties from the generalist vs. specialist philosophical mind set. You can spend your entire career doing exceptional DNA analysis on casework, but only by having taken the time and effort to learn the broad philosophy and general concepts of forensic science will you truly be a forensic scientist. If we are to maintain a unique professional identity with the goal of doing quality work while “improving the discipline and profession of forensic science” then we must all embrace the generalist philosophy.
Over the years, I’ve irritated more than a few people by arguing against the practicality of being a generalist. It took me time to articulate what I really meant, that Greg encapsulated so well: The generalist mentality means understanding the philosophy of forensic science*. We haven’t yet fully developed that philosophy but we do dance around the discussion frequently. I’ve made some contributions to this discussion, both in my dissertation and in the literature, about my perspective of forensic science as a historical science. I hope to expand these ideas in a book I’m working on for a university press (working title, "The Nature of Evidence).
To get at the core of “where we’re going,” we need to more than repeat the phrases of dead scientists or think we are somehow unique and special in a privileged sense; as Keynes said in a separate context, “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” We cannot be slaves to defunct magistrates, scientists, and forensic professionals. Simply rehashing forensic science* redux as a type of philosophical nostalgia won’t cut it. We need to disassemble our assumptions, methods, techniques, and biases and reconfigure our field anew. We may not like what we find, but its the only way we can improve.
Thanks, Greg. Lovely chat, as always, my friend.
American chemist who co-discovered saccharin. He taught chemistry at Johns Hopkins University from 1876 (where he became its second president 1901-13). He introduced advanced laboratory instruction using teaching methods he had learned in Germany.