Fingerprints and the Facade of Science

While perusing the internet today, I stumbled upon an incredible article in The New Yorker entitled "The Mark of a Masterpiece." Over the course of the piece, a tale unfolds that centers on a man named Peter Paul Biro, who has made a reputation and fortune for himself by authenticating paintings and drawings as the works of famous artists through the analysis of fingerprints that he finds on the work.

More than anything, this story brought to mind the blind reliance that many of us place on science. Biro himself is a sketchy character and his work appears to have little validity, but it is also worth noting that the discipline of fingerprinting itself is not entirely reliable. For one thing, it has never been definitively proven that every human being has a unique fingerprint. No two identical ones have ever been found, but that is a far cry from making the fundamental assumption that every fingerprint is one of a kind (Zabell, 164). Additionally, most fingerprints taken from crime scenes are 'latent prints,' meaning that they are accidental impressions left by friction ridge skin (I'm not entirely sure exactly what that means, I copied it from Wikipedia). The import of this is that most fingerprints are partial, overlapping, smudged or distorted, and that all of these transformations greatly increase the chance of error on the part of the analyst. And indeed, analysts do make mistakes. In a proficiency test designed by the IAI (International Association for Identification) and administered in 1995, 22% of the participants made 'erroneous identifications' (i.e. identified a latent print incorrectly as matching a finger that it did not come from) and only 44% correctly identified every latent print (Zabell, 167 - more reports on the proficiency of fingerprinting analysts can be found here).

Over the course of the article, it becomes clear that Biro's operation is really a simple scam, cloaked in the authenticity of science. Very few of his clients (or critics) have taken the time to actually examine the science of fingerprinting and how he employs it. David Grann, the reporter, writes, "Biro told me that he was now “pushing into the gray areas.” When he first revealed his findings on “La Bella Principessa,” Biro did not use the term “match,” as is standard among law-enforcement analysts, and as he had done in his reports on the paintings owned by Horton and the Parkers; rather, he said that the fingerprint on “La Bella Principessa” and the print on Leonardo’s “St. Jerome” were “highly comparable.”" This stands in stark contrast to how Biro has characterized his work elsewhere ("Biro asserted that he had uncovered the painting’s “forensic provenance,” telling a reporter, “The science of fingerprint identification is a true science. There are no gray areas.”") as well as what the science of fingerprinting aims at: "Science is not just one of several competing, equally valid forms of knowledge. Scientific procedures have evolved, and science is accorded great respect precisely because it is recognized that one can only obtain truly reliable knowledge by using its protocols and practices (Zabell, 152)." At this point, I must take a step back and point out that if some of the world's wealthiest people and most storied cultural institutions cannot take the time or expend the capital to identify bad science and simple fraud, then I don't see what hope there is for the valid use of fingerprint evidence in our criminal justice system, and (even more disturbingly) the sound use of any technology in the future. Admittedly, I must qualify this last statement. It seems to me that fingerprinting is a prime example of a science that promises the truth, particularly in arenas where that truth is hotly contested because of the substantial individual interests that are tied up in it (i.e. in a courtroom life and death hang in the balance, and in the world of international art sums of money that might suffice to purchase small tropical islands are at stake).

Ironically, it seems that science, initially meant as a method and procedure for observing the world and divining its underlying mechanisms, lends itself easily to deception in our modern era. The acronym DNA and other forensic fireworks (all of which we have become accustomed to in the course of watching CSI or Law and Order) appear not as tools for discovery, but instead as magical words that conjure our credulity. One need only conduct a simple Google search in order to find that the same charlatans and snake-oil salesmen who litter human history still exist, only now they mask their miracle panaceas behind the opaque facade of science.