True Crime & Forensic Pathology with Patricia Cornwell & Dr. Jonathan Hayes

24:58And by that, I mean StarTalk. I'm Ali Khan Hemraj, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

25:14Neil deGrasse Tyson:We're back, StarTalk. We're talking about forensic pathology with best-selling author Patricia Cornwell. and we have an authentic medical examiner in the house. In the house. We've got Dr. Jonathan, Dr. Jonathan Hayes, who's not only medical examiner for New York City of all places, but also a novelist in his own right. Chuck, right before the end of the second segment, it looked like you wanted to slip in a question. What was that? Well, because he talked about how when you write forensic science fiction, that it makes it kind of sexy and it draws people into the field. You didn't say sexy, you said romantic.

25:57That's different. I think sexy is right, too. I may have said sexy. Oh, all right. Yeah, you know, I'm sorry, Neil. Excuse me. Unfortunately for me, my romance leads to sexy. All right. But what I'm interested to know is do you find the same thing in your field of astrophysics Do you think science fiction causes people to now, like, pursue the science of the cosmos?

26:28Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, it does. So that's why, even though, just like Jonathan, I'll call out things that are not real or wouldn't have happened that way. But I say the overall impact is positive. Because what people can do now is they can get interested, and then they say, I like that. Let me read some more about it. And then the reading some more about it actually brings them into an anchored state of understanding, whereas the fantasy sort of tickled their interest up front. And Jonathan, I heard anecdotally that biology and chemistry professors in college found an increase in women taking courses that were sort of pre-forensic, inspired by the actors who you want to be like them in the series Crime Scene Investigation in CSI.

27:20Neil deGrasse Tyson:Did you find this as well coming up? Well, I think that increasingly forensics is becoming a matriarchy. There are a lot of women going into the field. And certainly in my field, my office, I would estimate, is probably more than 50 % female when it comes to the medical exam and stuff. And I think that's common in other areas too. But I don't think it's just that they're impressed by the actors. I think they have minds that are interested in problem solving and figuring out how to bury a body. No, but I mean, I grew up at a time when no scientist was portrayed as anything you'd want to be. Like, if you were cool and you saw a movie that had scientists in it, the scientists were not cool.

28:00Neil deGrasse Tyson:And so there was no draw. There was no pop culture force operating on how you might align your life's ambitions. And CSI, all the actors are beautiful. The men, the women, the storytelling, what they're wearing. Plus, they're shown with real-life problems, right? They have boyfriends, girlfriends, relationship problems. So they're fully fleshed out characters. So Jonathan, are you a fully fleshed out character? Oh dear God, that's a difficult question to ask. Hey, how does that work at the bar? Someone say, hey, what do you do? I study dead bodies. It's like, that's a short conversation, it might seem to me.

28:40No, people, you know, because there is this interest, there was an article in New York Magazine a few years back that said that forensic pathologists are the new supermodels. because, I mean, you turn on your TV set any hour of the day or night, you're going to see a forensic show, whether it's like, you know, true crime or whether it's some sort of thriller, whether someone's burying a body in the basement or whatnot. And the way my career in forensics in general is portrayed in popular culture, it really catches the imagination of people. And I think it's because at some level, in the old days, the hero was a guy with muscles who knew how to handle a gun.

29:12And forensics is an area where a nerd with a brain and some sharp insights is able to be even more powerful than that. And that's why the forensic science, I think, becomes a good hero.

29:25Neil deGrasse Tyson:Well, so let's pick up with my interview with Patricia Cornwell, who in her next book, there's like crime in space. Let's see what she says about that. I think that I might be the first author that has written about a case of violence in low Earth orbit, in microgravity, in space, in other words, to do it in the credible way that it's not science fiction. I mean, everything that I have in that scene, that Scarpetta has to remotely work from the Situation Room in the White House to get, I mean, it's all within the realm of possibility. And the physics of it, what would happen when there's blood or the type of projectile somebody might use if you were going to do that.

30:12And look, you know, as well as I do, the Russians have carried guns up there to the space station. They don't, you know, NASA doesn't advertise that, but it's true. And we, it's, the whole point is, my little mantra these days is from, from earth, from space to ground to six feet under, because wherever we go, we will export what we do, whether it's in orbiting laboratories down the road, or when people actually go to the moon and try to set up habitats or Mars or it's going to happen. And we're also going to have death. You know, we're going to have things that we don't like to think about. And for me, I'm always wondering, what are you going to do about that?

30:54So people will be

30:56Neil deGrasse Tyson:people, whether they're on earth or in space, and you're there to tell that kind of story. Well, you know, the thing that's kind of fun about it, because I talk to the real people, I talked to NASA people about this. You know, I talked to Jack Fisher, the astronaut who was up there for a while, and we talked about what blood would do and fluids. Just to be clear, blood that's not in your body. That's true. Blood that's not in your body. Blood that has spilled out of your body. What will it do? And then what happens, you know, where you've got a scene where something like this has occurred and some astronauts, you know, come and will use the Dream Chaser.

31:31I know it's not crude yet, but it probably will be. and they get to this orbiter that's in peril. Well, if you've had anything where you have death inside and a violent death, what's that going to be like? And how does a medical examiner work that?

31:49Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, Jonathan, this brings up an interesting question. You are completely trained for Earth-based crimes. That is, crimes operating under the laws of physics as they manifest in 1G. here on Earth. Can you imagine a future where if we have colonies on the moon or Mars or beyond or hotels in space, can you imagine a branch, a sub-branch of your field that then has to sort of learn space physics to do your job? Neil, I don't know how much space physics there's going to be involved. I think the periods of time that man is going to spend in zero gravity are going to be fairly limited. And perhaps not when it comes to things like the space station, but when you're looking at actually larger colonies where people would actually live, which is where I think violence is mostly likely to play out, I think there'll be at normal gravity.

32:40And, you know, the traditional medical examiner role is going to be pretty much the same. I think it'll be fairly specialized, the cases like Patty was talking about, like I'm assuming some sort of violent blood spilling murder takes place in microgravity or zero gravity. And I don't know if that's going to be a frequent enough occurrence that it's going to develop into its own full-fledged specialty. But it's going to be... You'd hope not. I almost hope not. But that will be a challenge. And when I was thinking about that too, what it could mean, a crime scene in zero gravity, the first thing that struck me was what Patty was talking about was the blood dropped spatter dynamics going to be different.

33:21Because, you know, you've probably seen your, you know, when you walk along after you've cut yourself, you can see the shape of the blood spatter on your floor or whatever, and you can interpret the way you're moving. Or if you're standing still, if you're standing still, or the person is standing still and dripping blood from, say, a weapon onto the floor, it tends to have a round appearance. Whereas when you're moving, it tends to have a teardrop appearance. But that's going to be different in microgravity or zero gravity. And so I think there's going to be some interesting science that's probably going to evolve because of that.

33:52But I have to say, I mean, this is a question for you, just how realistic are these? We talk about, you know, colonizing distant planets, but on a large scale, how realistic is it? I mean, we had the Concorde in 1965 or something like that. We had supersonic travel available to, again, the very wealthy man, but it's gone now. And so how realistic are these streams of colonizing fallen planets?

34:15Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, I think if I tend to be a little on the skeptical side that any of that is going to happen anytime soon. But that shouldn't prevent people from getting ready for it, either legally or medically or the like. Little things, for example, as I understand it from movies I've seen, if you die while you're seated, then blood collects in your butt and in your feet or something, right? because you don't have this sort of action, this vascular action to keep blood circulating. And in zero G, the blood doesn't collect anywhere. So a lot of your cues you would use to judge how long a body's been dead are not available to you.

34:57Yeah, that's a fascinating thought. You're absolutely right. And how quickly will people bleed from an open wound if there's zero gravity?

35:03Neil deGrasse Tyson:Right, right, right. That's all of that. And so - Let me ask you this. I was just going to ask from a forensic standpoint because one of the things that happens in space is like a common death is like soup malfunction or something. And the person freezes solid because they're in space. Now, would you be able to do an autopsy on, like if the person died, would you be able to do an autopsy on a solidly frozen body? It's like, you know, when you have a frozen body, it's like trying to chip into an iceberg. You're not going to get very far. So all you have to do is thaw the body. And of course, as you thaw the body, the body begins to break down fairly rapidly.

35:44Of course, in space, I think there may also be issues of desiccation, the body drying out very quickly. And there are questions of barotrauma, and even there's far more about this than I do, where the body is subjected to tremendous pressures out of the vacuum of space or removed from the vacuum of space. So it'll be, when we do start to see it, it'll be interesting. But I think I may have retired before that happens.

36:10Neil deGrasse Tyson:I went to a time relevant. I have to ask, you know, how often am I hanging out with a forensic pathologist? Could you explain exactly what rigor mortis is? Rigor mortis is stiffening of the muscles that occurs after death. The muscle proteins gradually kind of coagulate, and as they coagulate, they stiffen up, the muscles stiffen. And you first detect it in, well, the first place you can detect it is with goose flesh because you have tiny little muscles that raise and lower the hairs on your body to trap air and keep you warm or not. So in the early stages, when rigor first comes in, you'll start to see a little bit of goose flesh developing and you see these tiny little muscles pulling up.

36:49Neil deGrasse Tyson:Wait, wait, just to be clear, you're on a first-name basis with rigor mortis, okay? You call it rigor sets in. Rigor. Yeah, rigor mortis sets a bit longer. Rigor, yeah. Okay, I'm not on a first-name basis. I'm sorry. Maybe I'll warm up to that. I hope you never get that. But go on. But you test for rigor by trying to bend joints. And fairly small joints like finger joints become stiff first because it takes a lot of muscles to stiffen the hip joint or the knee joint. So you test in the fingers first, then we test in the jaw, and then the arms, et cetera. And so from the amount of rigor that's present in the body, you can get some soft sense of how long the person has been dead to get that degree of stiffness.

37:33Now, a lot of it relates to the body temperature at the time of death. If someone has a seizure at the time they die, if they have a violent seizure, say they're doing cocaine or something like that, they have a seizure and they die, that will raise the body temperature and the person will go into rigor mortis faster. So you have to be very careful. Interpreting the time since death is one of the hardest things we do. It's part of the science that's closest to an art, really.

37:54Neil deGrasse Tyson:And so then I heard that rigor mortis eventually goes away. So what happens there? It does. the muscle proteins begin to break down again and the rigor slackens. But now you're starting to get onto, you know, the body's beginning, it's about to begin to break down. Typically, you can feel rigor mortis by about six hours after death. It's generally there by about 12 hours and goes off by about 36 hours. Oh, wow. Wow. Okay, so that whole expression where someone, you refer to a dead body as a stiff, that's a temporary condition. Yeah, but I think stiff sounds better than temporary. is stiff. We don't use that expression.

38:35You'd actually be surprised. I mean, it's because we see death the whole time. We're not alarmed or surprised. There's not an intense emotional reaction. There's not an intense emotional reaction to it unless it's the death of a child or some particularly tragic circumstance there. So we don't say the word cadaver. We don't say corpse. We just call them bodies. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's very politically correct. It is politically correct. I'm just going to say, Jonathan, I don't think they'll be offended. That's right. And if they are, who are they going to tell?

39:10Neil deGrasse Tyson:So how about this? Just before we go to break, if a crime is committed in a distant place, again, I'm thinking space here because Patricia's novel was in space. If a crime happens in space, are you able to talk someone through an investigation of a scene? If let's say they're just generally scientifically literate, but they have no medical background such as what you have, can you talk them through it and then have them submit a report on your behalf for having done so? I think I could. I could tell them what to look for. I could tell them how to tell the body and what to check for. I think I could do that.

39:48I mean, obviously I'd want them to document as far as they could, whether with photographs or videos so I could see for myself.

39:54Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, exactly. So you could do this from the beach while they're up there doing the artwork. In theory, but there's no real substitute for seeing with your own eyes. And that's actually what autopsy means. Autopsy means own eyes. It says having your own eyes looking at the body and seeing what's going on inside it. Wow, I hadn't thought about that. Look at that. All right, all right, all right. And another thing, all right, now one last question. I've got one. What is the temperature of the slidey things that you put the body in down in the morgue? I always wondered what that is. We don't use those anymore.

40:28I'm sorry about that. Oh, come on.

40:30Neil deGrasse Tyson:No, bring them back. We need them. The old superstitions have to be disposed of. No, I mean, it's like you couldn't clean the floors of those refrigerators, you know, because of the slide in and out things. So eventually they begin to reek and build up fluid. So it's a horrible thing. It's just walk-in refrigerators like you have at your local restaurant and a system of gurneys for transporting the bodies on. The only time we see those raw type... He means meat locker. Chuck, did I hear him say meat locker? Yeah, I was going to say... That's exactly what he said. Yeah, I was going to say, I hope to God it's not like my local restaurant.

41:07Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, we got a slab of steer right here, and we got Ernie. Yeah, Ernie didn't make it through last night. We're going to take a quick break, But more on forensic pathology with our two guests, Patricia Cornwell and Jonathan Hayes from StarTalk Return.

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45:02Neil deGrasse Tyson:We're back with Jonathan Hayes, a medical examiner of New York City. Jonathan, right before we took a break, you were about to tell a story because we were talking about meat lockers. Yes. Because we think that's what you were describing. Well, no, we do. Modern storage of bodies is in walk-in coolers, which are just very efficient way to handle the space and they're easy to clean. But, you know, in terms of meat lockers, during the cocaine wars of the 1980s into about 1990, in Miami, there were so many homicides that they weren't able to hold all the bodies in the mall refrigerators. And so what they were forced to do was to rent trucks and they rented some refrigerator trucks.

45:46And some of them had the Burger King logo on the outside of those. And when word got out that bodies were being stored in Burger King refrigerator trailers, apparently there was such an outcry amongst the population that the agency got a large amount of money to build this beautiful new state-of-the-art facility with appropriate body storage. So that was a really upside of that.

46:11Neil deGrasse Tyson:That sounded tactical, actually. Hold the pickle, hold the lettuce, and the dead guy. Thanks. Well, I think the thing is medical examiner's offices really only sort of rapidly improve when there's been a scandal. I mean, it's one of the sad truths. They tend to be fairly neglected politically. No one wants to talk about them. No one wants to fund them. So we tend to jump forward when there's something terrible like that happens. Well, so I have to ask, in these meat lockers and in refrigerator trucks, how are the dead humans stored? Are they on meat hooks like slabs of beef? No, actually, Neil, they're not on meat hooks like slabs of beef.

46:46I am so disappointed now.

46:51Neil deGrasse Tyson:This has really been disillusioning for you both. I know. It really is. Look, I'm sorry we interviewed you. We'd rather just imagine this stuff. Don't ruin it all with facts. That's what I was saying. My old boss, Dr. Charles, used to have an expression, to slay an ugly theory with a beautiful fact. Yes. To slay a beautiful theory with an ugly fact. Right. I'm sorry to have made this such a sad thing. I mean, no more bodies hanging on meat hooks. But you have to at least store them horizontally, right? Otherwise, it won't work. Yeah, well, I mean, I suppose you could just store them vertically, but the blood would pool, as you were talking about earlier.

47:28Yeah, no, the body is stored in a shelving system with it. It's all very modular and very efficient.

47:35Neil deGrasse Tyson:I know. There are all sorts of systems for mass storage of bodies, and all agencies are prepared for mass fatality events. Wow. So can I ask you this? A long time ago, I interviewed a police officer, and he talked about a person who was murdered, and they found him in his apartment in New York City. The way they found him is he leaked through the ceiling. Ew. So what would that be? Yeah, my question is, what happened, if that's the case, or was this guy messing with me? No, I'm sure he was telling you the truth. What happens is after death, the body begins to break down. There's no immune system anymore.

48:20The white cells die off. The bacteria now rage throughout the body and the bacteria produce gas and they cause the body to bloat and they break down the blood and cause it to go red and green and create a lot of discoloration. And as the pressure in the tissues builds from the gas as the body swells, the body will exude fluids as its tissues break down. That fluid would be called purge fluid, and that will spill out around the body, and sometimes it'll soak through the ceiling. Holy crap. I know it's not an attractive thing. Yeah, that's terrible.

48:56Neil deGrasse Tyson:So the bloating, that makes the body much less dense than it once was because it's the same mass now occupying a bigger volume. This would then cause the body to float if it was dead and at the bottom of any, in the river. So that's why you need cement boots, right? That's exactly why you need cement boots. But it's also why if someone goes into the water, into the East River or into the Hudson during the winter, it may be a few months before the body develops enough gas from bacterial overgrowth that it'll actually start to float up to the top. So there may be a delay between someone drowning and us actually finding the bodies.

49:38there's this popular notion that when spring comes and the weather warms up and the water temperature warms up then you get a harvest of bodies bobbing up to the surface it's not quite that extreme but yeah we don't we don't bodies that are floating tend to people by sometimes they you know they get clothing to trap some air or they may have swallowed some air and they can

49:56Neil deGrasse Tyson:float because of that okay so just just to be very precise this because you're you're breaking down this whole, the whole evolution of a dead body. So, so the rigor mortis that gives us the language, where's the stiff, right? So we got that. Then you bloat and then that makes you buoyant. So that gets us the cement boots part of crime. Right. And okay. I'm just, I'm just fleshing out the full picture here. So this is highly illuminating for me. Thank you. Good. No, I mean, clearly you're on top of this stuff. You should have gone into forensic medicine rather than astrophysics. You could have used people like you.

50:39So, dovetailing on what Neil just said, could you commit the perfect murder? You mean in terms of killing someone and getting away with it? Oh, Jack. Leaving behind no evidence or no discernible cause of death or no way. I mean, forget alibis and all that kind of police work stuff. Just like they would never be able to trace it back to you. Could you do that?

51:03Neil deGrasse Tyson:So we put Jonathan together with the TV series, How to, what's it called? How to Commit a Perfect Murder. How to Get Away with Murder. How to Get Away with Murder. How to Get Away with Murder. There it is. So the two of them, because they know what everybody's looking for. Yeah, so Jonathan. Right. Jonathan. I better never see you having lunch with Viola Davis. They're plotting. Viola Davis, the star. Somebody's going. Somebody's going down. Childhood Davis, the star of How to Get Away with Murder. So wouldn't that make you a prime suspect in a murder where there's otherwise no evidence? I hope not.

51:42Neil deGrasse Tyson:Good answer. You should just stop there. Don't say anything else. No, I should. I think it is possible. It would be possible to kill someone without leaving any clues or trace. Let's not go. Okay. All right. But it is true. I have no intention of killing anyone. It is true. It's very hard to dispose of a dead body. That's the problem. It's not killing people. It's getting rid of the body. We had a case where a man murdered his wife, and then he buried her in the basement. And then for the next couple of weeks, he sat there watching endless repeats of CSI. And then finally, he went to the police station and says, look, you're going to get me sooner or later.

52:21I'm going to tell you I murdered my wife, and I buried her in the basement.

52:24Neil deGrasse Tyson:Wow. Wow. So CSI solved the crime. even though it did but CSI also creates problems because now for a while at least when the show was you know on the air all the time and everyone loved it there's six different variations I think the CBS is actually bringing it back but the juries began to demand higher levels of visual proof they wanted more sort of glamorous you know animations and like incredible cutting-edge science which as I said was on the border of science fiction right right and by the way CSI wasn't just medical. There was also some physics involved and thermodynamics. I mean, not in every episode, but they would bring in some of the physical sciences when they related to the crime and the murder.

53:06Neil deGrasse Tyson:There were some scientifically literate people there. CSI had a traveling museum exhibit where you would then solve your own crime. Kids, a kid exhibit, where you go step by step and they give you clues and you have to figure it out. It was a big force on the television landscape. I was very impressed to watch that unfold. Well, how about the future of AI? AI is going to touch all of us in every way. It already has in some professions. But Patricia thought about that. And she was very impressed with what the future of AI might bring. So let's find out what she tells us. What's happening today is so amazing.

53:47And the line between what's real and what isn't, assuming we even know the difference between the two, The line is getting blurrier and blurrier. And so basically, when you think of an Alexa or these devices that we have, ultimately, everybody is you're going to have artificial intelligence assistance, even if even if you don't know you've got it. And and that's the thing that's both good and bad about it is that it we can't be without it. I mean, we can't manage this world, in my opinion, without artificial intelligence, especially think of air traffic control when you have drones buzzing around and things like that.

54:28Neil deGrasse Tyson:Oh, wait, wait, wait. You just said something very important. You're suggesting that the complexity of the world we are building for ourselves may one day require AI just to navigate it. Well, look at what's happened with your mobile phones. I mean, we've created many computers that people really almost can't function without.

54:54Neil deGrasse Tyson:So, Jonathan, can you picture a day where AI conducts the investigation and not you? I think a citizen would be closer. I don't think AI will ever be. For example, things like an autopsy. Not all bodies are the same. Everybody has numerous different idiosyncrasies. they're very subtle little anatomic differences in structure and actually examining the body is a very complex thing it's visually like sometimes olfactory and then it's you know the touch and you know the feeling of you know actually putting your hands in and examining the length of the wound etc i think it'll be a long time before there's uh you know robots or whatever that are sensitive enough to to be able to do that with the discrimination a human can do that said when they do, I expect they may have a slightly higher degree of accuracy.

55:42I think there's less room for observer bias then. But for a long time, those robots will have to be overseen by someone human to see if they haven't gone hopelessly off the rails. I think where AI will be useful, things like in a crime scene, there's a million things going on in a crime scene. I think the big problem is trying to decide what's relevant to the crime and what's not. For example, if you have a dead body lying on the floor, there's blood spatter over the place. There could be a thousand blood spatter droplets distributed about the floor and the walls, even the ceiling of the apartment sometimes.

56:15And if you think at some point the killer stood with his knife over the victim or was carrying the knife and may have left his own blood on the scene, how do you figure out which of all those drops of blood is significant and which relates to the killer and is not actually the victim's blood. And I think with pattern recognition, and, you know, that's the sort of thing that I think that AI down the road might be able to look at, like a dense information field, look for patterns and find out the subtle exception that would escape the human eye. But I do think it's a long time, and I, you know, I do think it's a long time before we'll be able to rely on AI.

56:52For example, at the moment, there's a lot of discussion in forensic pathology about stopping doing autopsies and just doing it all virtual. A vertopsy is an examination of the body using a CT scanner. And the Swiss are very keen on this and they feel that it can completely replace doing the autopsy itself. They don't, they still do autopsies. But I think increasing, they're moving towards virtual autopsies. New York, in the legal system, New York lawyers are not going to say, you know, are not going to just sit back and accept that the virtual, the CT scan is accurate, that is a subdural hematoma rather than, say, meningitis that you're looking at.

57:28So I think it's going to be a while before that sort of technology comes in and plays specifically a guiding or controlling part.

57:36Neil deGrasse Tyson:Well, you sound like Chuck, because I said this to Chuck. He said, no, comedy is too complicated for AI to take it over. So Chuck just wants to make sure he's still employed going into the field. Oh, absolutely, yeah. There's no way they could tell a joke. not with all the nuance that a comedian does and by the way if they ever do you can rest assured a glass of water inside their circuitry is waiting coming right from me that's called murder Chuck yes but it there's a word for it roboticide I don't know if you can kill something that's inanimate but that's a philosophical discussion for another forum, I think.

58:23But I think you're right. I think that gets at it. Because if someone, can you imagine a robot comedian trying to handle a heckler? You know, the complexities involved in that, the analysis of what was being said, which will have probably obscure cultural references if you're a silicon-based machine. Right. And then actually trying to have to formulate a response. That's a really good example, I think. And even just, you know, the Turing test, if you're computed to pass the Turing test, well, that's a lot less challenging than it was before.

58:49Neil deGrasse Tyson:It reminds me, there's a brief moment in the movie Terminator where he's repairing his injured arm in a hotel room and someone knocks on the door and he has to figure out what response to give him. So you see this, you see through his mind's eye, I mean through his computer eye, you see a multiple choice. It's go away, I'm busy, or come back later, or f*** you asshole. And he goes and chooses that response. So it could be if you have an AI comedian and there's a heckler, they can decide whether they're nice to the heckler or not. It's a knob that you turn. But Jonathan, you said something very important, which I'm very sensitive to just in my own field, where pattern recognition, humans are good at it, but we can be very biased.

59:45Neil deGrasse Tyson:If you take an unbiased pattern-recognizing AI, it can, for complex things, just like you said, the splatter pattern of blood or a pattern of casings, shell casings, where they landed and how, they might be able to do a back extrapolation into where the gun was when it was fired. and there could be some interesting sort of three-dimensional analysis that AI could perform that we couldn't. Absolutely, that's how I think it'll unroll. I mean, when I first started, when I first came to New York, and it was 1990, we had this nightmarish homicide rate. We're having six murders a day. And they just had no time to investigate the cases.

1:00:31So we'd be working off for the scene investigation. I didn't go to the scenes, but we'd get, the investigating detectives would show up in like six or seven Polaroids at the crime scene. You know, poor resolution, not ideally photographed, not ideally lit. And it just wasn't great. And then, you know, fast forward, you know, whatever, 30 years, and we've got, you know, video, we've got high resolution. Even the photograph your iPhone takes is just amazing. And we have this really cool machine now that you put it in the center of a room and just scans the entire room, very Blade Runner machine, scans the entire room and measures all the distances and can rebuild a model of that room.

1:01:07And that's fascinating technology. and I think that's where things are going. I mean, you see it in the real estate market now, you know, when people are selling the house, they can have a virtual walkthrough using this thing. But you can measure accurately down to the centimeter. Discriminating between what's real and what is irrelevant is really a big problem in forensics. And it's one of the things that frustrates me, and like CSI, Gil Grissom will walk into the scene and then he'll pick up a single fragment of glass in a whole field filled with glasses. Well, this just doesn't fit. This is the problem.

1:01:37And that is the answer. And it just doesn't work like that, sadly. But, but, if that were Sherlock Watson, the AI, Sherlock Watson, the AI would be able to do that. Yeah, yeah, they would. Sherlock Watson would walk in and just be like, this man's been dead for 12 hours. 12 hours and 36 minutes, yes, okay. Right, they'd be like, yeah, but the rigor mortis isn't right. And he'd be like, rigor please, no, this man, I can tell you, has been dead.

1:02:10Neil deGrasse Tyson:Sherlock Watson. Okay, that's a good one. Sherlock Watson, the AI. Very good. I mean, that's the direction we're going in. But, you know, you know how fallible computers are. You know, they still depend. I still think for a very long time, and maybe forever, they're going to need humans to sign off on them, but they haven't gotten the stick wrong. And, of course, that reintroduces the whole question of bias, which is one of the big challenges. Yeah, of course, of course. Mm-mm-mm. All right. Once again, Sherlock Watson sends another black man to jail. Damn. Damn. Chuck, that means it's time to end.

1:02:46Right now.

1:02:50Neil deGrasse Tyson:Jonathan, it's been great having you on. You're the first forensic pathologist I've ever had a conversation with. And maybe it showed, for better or for worse. Have you been talking to the other forensic pathologist or something? No, I just haven't. it's just a non-overlapping Venn diagrams in my life. But it was delighted to have you on. I want to thank you for taking time away from your very important and busy schedule to join us in my interview with Patricia Cornwell. And delighted to hear that you have two novels out there, Precious Blood and A Hard Death. And we'll look for them wherever books are sold, of course.

1:03:32Neil deGrasse Tyson:And so, Chuck, thanks for being here, as always. Always a pleasure, always. Yeah, and Jonathan, we're going to try to find you again because this topic has no end. Good, it doesn't. And I was really interested to hear your thoughts about the future of space colonies because that's something I think about a lot in the last few months as we've watched the private enterprises take people into space. I'm just curious. Yeah, here's a quick one for you. Are you ready? So if you bury someone on the moon, there are no microorganisms there to decompose the body. So the only organism are the microbes that were in your body when you were buried, but there's nothing exterior to that.

1:04:07Neil deGrasse Tyson:So the whole decomposition arc will be very different because of that, because it's not really soil. That's all you need, though. We carry, if there's some sort of horrific statistic about what percentage of our body mass is bacteria, and it's a significant portion, that'll be enough. Yeah, I just looked at it. We have more bacterial cells in our body than we have body cells. So that's pretty freaky right there. The rate limiting thing there is going to be cold and is also going to be water. Bacteria, most bacteria, like a little bit of warmth and water to germinate. Jonathan, delight to have you on.

1:04:44Neil deGrasse Tyson:Thanks for taking time out. Chuck, Chuck, always good to have you. This has been StarTalk, forensic pathology edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. Keep looking up.

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