Tracing A Threat

Abstract

Everything leaves a trace—fingerprints, ballistics, DNA. Law enforcement agents have an extensive forensic toolbox to link perpetrators to crime scenes and murder weapons. But what happens when the murder weapon is a molecule? Scientists are discovering that even a chemical holds clues that can point to its source. This nascent field is known as chemical forensics. Its goal is to take analytical techniques that have been used for forensic analysis, such as impurity profiling and stable isotope analysis, and use them to attribute weaponized toxic chemicals or related substances to their sources. A chemical forensic analysis could, for example, trace a chemical threat agent back to the specific lot of the precursor that was used to make it. By developing chemical forensics, scientists “have a greater chance of finding perpetrators of chemical attacks or their sources of materials before they can strike again,” explains Carlos G. Fraga, a chemical forensics ...