[Music] There's a great variety of different topics that come up within forensic science. It really is a subject of great diversity, as can be seen from this slide. While we're looking at all this diversity, we should try and dispel a myth that is built up by watching C.S.I. shows on TV, and that is that an individual forensic scientist would never be able to tackle all subjects that you see in front of him. It really is a subject for specialists, people specializing in one area of forensic science, and they do not work as generalists. In particular, we can split forensics into two areas. On the left, you can see forensic medicine. And forensic medicine is very clearly defined because it's purely concerned with a body; whether it's a living body or a dead body, looking at that body, working out how injuries may have happened to that body, is the job of specialists in forensic medicine. And anyone in the field of forensic medicine would have gotten there by first qualifying as a medical doctor and then specializing further. On the right, you have what is properly called forensic science, and this is dealing with just about everything that is not a body, from fingerprints through to DNA. And people in this area tend to have good qualification in one of the basic sciences. So you have forensic medicine on the left, forensic science on the right. Now television programs have made forensic science very fashionable at the moment. But even without TV, many forensic scientists have achieved some kind of celebrity status. On the left is Singapore's own Chao Tzee Cheng. His area of course was forensic medicine and he was one of the founders of this area here in Singapore. In the centre you see Dr. Pornthip and she's one of the most well known practitioners of forensic medicine from the Kingdom of Thailand. And you have to say that she doesn't look like what you imagine someone in that field would look like. And on the right hand side is one of the first celebrities of forensic science or forensic medicine, and this is Sir Bernard Spilsbury. And during this course we'll discuss a number of the cases that came in front of Sir Bernard, and he was a great authority figure in forensic medicine in Britain, certainly in the first few decades of the 20th Century. When you spend a long time studying forensic science and looking at the different crimes that have been committed, you may start to get worried about going home or going outside your house. So to begin the course, I'd like to offer you a little bit of reassurance that the world, or at least most of the world, is actually a fairly safe place. So here I've selected some murder rates for different places around the world. So if we exclude countries where there is actually a war going on, then the highest murder rates are in countries such as Colombia. A few years ago, the rate in Colombia was much higher, it dropped in the last few years. It's still a very high rate by worldwide standards, and this is due to drug gangs and it's particularly concentrated in a few cities such as Medellin, where the drug gangs have been very powerful. Currently one of the highest murder rates in the world is Honduras, and again, that is due to drug gangs and the murder rate there recently was reported to be 71 per 100,000 population per year. From watching TV, because so many crime shows on TV comes from the United States, we often think of the United States as a very violent country. But their murder rate is only 4.7, well below that of Honduras and Colombia. The interesting thing about the United States is the great variety within one country, so that 4.7 average hides huge areas where the murder rate is almost 0 and a few places where the murder rate is much higher. For instance, Washington D.C., the murder rate is significantly higher, almost up at Colombia levels. Actually, that murder rate for Washington D.C. is a great improvement over a few years ago. Here in Singapore, it's relatively low, at 0.51. Here in the United Kingdom where I come from, 1.23. And other countries in Europe, for instance, it's that order of magnitude. So don't be afraid to step outside your house. Generally, it's not that dangerous a world.
