• Question: The liquid used in CSI to identify if there has been any blood spilt recently, what is it called? How does it work? The machinery they use to identify fingerprints and DNA does it really exist or is it just propaganda?

    Asked by carmelalewis to Darren, Deuan, Duncan, Lori-An, Michelle on 24 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Darren Nesbeth

      Darren Nesbeth answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      Laughable propaganda. In reality CSI is dull and consists of regularly changing your gloves and writing reports. At lease that’s what it looked like on “Real CSI” which they used to show after the US show.

    • Photo: Lori-An Etherington

      Lori-An Etherington answered on 23 Jun 2010:

      The liquid is called luminol and can be sprayed across a crime scene where it reacts to blood by making it luminescent. It only takes about five seconds to have an effect and should be done in a darkened room in order to see the faint bluish glow, and the stength of the glow increases if there is a lot of blood present. It apparently works even with old or diluted blood stains, and even smear marks where blood has been wiped away. The main draw back with using luminol is that it can destroy the properties of the blood that investigators need for further testing ie. DNA
      Also fingerprint and DNA identity is often used in criminal investigation, using reference to a growing database of information.
      Hope this helps 🙂

    • Photo: Michelle Hudson-Shore

      Michelle Hudson-Shore answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      I think it’s called luminol, it reacts with the blood to make it glow under UV light. I think the speed at which a lot of the things on CSI are done is very far fetched and possibly some of the methods but then it wouldn’t be entertaining if it took them a week to run a DNA test or if they never found a fingerprint match in their database 🙂

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