The Dead Do Talk by Porntip Rojanasunan

Author:Porntip Rojanasunan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789814382960
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish

THIRTEEN

STRANGE

DNA CASES

WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT THAT IT WOULD BE ME WHO would introduce the use of DNA evidence to the Thai criminal justice system? If you have been following this story from the beginning, you might, as I do, come to believe in Dharmic predestination.

When I was a child, I enjoyed spending time surrounded by nature. In my free time at school, I spent many hours around the edges of wells or in gardens, looking at frogs and ladybirds. I really enjoyed watching them move around doing what they do. I could sit there for hours in the quiet studying the creatures around me, letting thoughts and questions drift into my mind. Why do frogs need to live halfway between land and water? When they go into the water, where do they stay? Why and when do they need to return to dry land? Why do frogs go through so many transformations from the egg to adulthood? Why do they have two bulgy eyes and a tail? When the tail begins to disappear four legs begin to appear — how does that happen? Why, when the tail disappears, can the frog come onto land? These questions, and thousands of others, fascinated my young mind.

Of course, once I began to study science and medicine in earnest, many of these types of questions were answered but the urge to know new things remained with me into adulthood. As a pathologist, my curiosity about the field of genetics matches my childhood fascination with small garden creatures.

When it came to household pets, I liked cats most of all because my relatives on my mother’s side loved raising them. My aunt always believed that a three-coloured cat brings good luck to its owner, but only if the cat is a male. By the time I was fourteen years old, I had yet to see a three-coloured cat. My nagging curiosity was finally answered one day, when I realised that in this world there is no way that a three-coloured male cat could exist. This is because the genes controlling colour are genes from the X chromosome alone. If the cat was yellow and black, it showed that the X chromosome had to exist, meaning that the feline could only be female.

This fascination with genetics almost enticed me away from my medical studies, and it was only by luck that a new professor urged me to stay on track to be a doctor.

I drifted back into the study of genetics while studying medical pathology. I learnt a great deal about DNA from the chromosomes associated with various diseases. There is a close association between disease and DNA since many conditions have an inbuilt hereditary factor. Some diseases are related to abnormalities in chromosomes, and some are related to abnormalities in a person’s genes. What is important to know here is that people who have the same abnormalities in both genes and chromosomes demonstrate different symptoms from those who suffer from either genetic or chromosomal abnormalities. For example, Down’s Syndrome is associated with abnormalities in the 21st chromosome (Trisomy 21).

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