Unitariness, evidence and quality in bio-medicolegal sciences

Abstract

The “global society of risk“ in today’s post-modern world is increasingly permeated with scientific−technological content, heralding uncertainty and weakness due to the high frequency of errors, whether systematic, erratic, casual, true or false, unintentional or, more rarely, intentional. The so-called incontrovertible truths flowing into the “cemetery of errors” of science are de-structured and re-structured depending on a “contradictory” and “erratic” periodicity. The myth of the supremacy and infallibility of science, long trusted by juridical science and jurisprudence, has vanished, being dealt the final blow by the outcome of the pervasive Daubert vs. Merrel Dow Pharmaceuticals sentence of the U.S.A. Supreme Court (509 U.S. 579, 1993). In U.S. and European criminal and civil laws, the “juridical construction of science”, entailing scientific knowledge by hypothesis, contingently true, acquires validity in relation to the specific aim pursued. And in which, for the sciences of risk (including biomedical sciences), general and specific causality is affirmed or negated depending on the rate of error and probability. That is, principles of cause and causality, error rates, theories on “probability” and “relativistic truths”, innate to the history of thought and philosophy, are adopted to fit pre-chosen theoretical systems. In this framework, the evaluative epi-crises and the conclusions of the “biomedical sciences of risk” pertain to a system of knowledge, the reliability, truth or falsity of which depends on the contemporary “transitory theoretical−practical systematics” of biomedicine, whose progress relies upon the discovery of errors and the processing of new theories. This confirms the Hippocratic Oath of the Third Millennium, which founded the ethical role of the physician on his professionalism, or rather, on the capacity to play the role of researcher, in the constant search for errors, the discovery of which reduces uncertainty in science, enhances professional formation and improves the quality of the system. In the context of the biomedical sciences, the paramount goal of legal medicine is “to discover the truth and state the justice”, this being achieved by applying proper, particular “SYSTEMATICS”. This, declinable as “methodology of ascertainment” and “criteriology of evaluation”, aims at: acquisition of the objectivity of the datum, and its translation into proof, if possessing the characteristics of evidence and irrefutability; epi-critical interpretation, aiming for evaluative conclusions of a diverse nature and finality. “Systematics” capable of encompassing and unifying multiple budding, whose gradual innovation and sometimes pervasive extension has led to the generation, the development and the definitive consolidation of disciplines such as forensic pathology, forensic genetics, forensic toxicology, forensic psychopathology, criminology and forensic anthropology, as well as that of many other sectors of study, to indepth investigation, that have yet to be consolidated in further disciplines. This tumultuous disciplinary budding process has led to a loss of unitariness in medicolegal knowledge, with an S. D. Ferrara (*) Forensic Toxicology and Antidoping, University-Hospital of Padova, Via Falloppio 50, 35121 Padova, Italy e-mail: santodavide.ferrara@unipd.it