microscopy

• In any struggle between victim and attacker, hairs and fibres from one are inevitably transferred to the other. The importance of hair in criminal investigations was realised at an early stage in the development of forensic science, and one of the first scientific

  papers on the subject was published in France in 1857. By the early 1900s microscopic examination of hair was well established.
• Hair can provide crime investigators with important clues.
• Hair is an appendage of the skin that grows out of an organ known as the hair follicle.
• There are three basic scale structures:

  Coronal

  (crown-like)

  Spinous

  (petal-like)

  Imbricate

  (flattened)
• Hair is composed of a group of proteins (keratins) that interconnect to formstable fibrils.
• A microscopic examination of a hair cross section reveals an outer layer of cuticular scales that surrounds the shaft, an inner darker portion called the cortex and in the centre of the cortex a canal-like structure called the medulla.
• Aparting from burning, hair is virtually indestructible.
• It remains identifiable even on bodies in an advanced state of decomposition or attached to objects after a crime has been committed.
• The forensic scientist using a microscope can make even a single hair yield information about the race, sex and age of its owner, and whilehair does not have the same individual character as a fingerprint, itcan provide vital evidence.