From Michael Berkson, Cambridge, UK
The problems of DNA evidence discussed in Turi King’s The Secrets of Our DNA are foreshadowed in G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown story, The Mistake of the Machine. A person is arrested for the murder of Lord Falconroy on the evidence of a polygraph test, where the test had picked him out because he was Lord Falconroy. Father Brown’s comment is equally applicable to The Secrets of Our DNA: “You always forget that the reliable machine always has to be worked by an unreliable machine… I mean Man, the most unreliable machine I know of (30 May, p 24).”
