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

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk, Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist.

And today, we’re going to talk about forensic pathology, not only the real thing, but what happens when it becomes novelized and becomes fictionalized storytelling.

Chuck, always good to have you.

Always good to be here, alive, alive.

I think on this topic, we’re going to need some serious levity.

Well, nothing like that.

I mean, yeah.

And what do you call it when it’s already done?

Now, Gallo’s humor is when you’re about to die.

What do you call it when you’re already dead?

I don’t know.

I don’t know if I want to know.

So, we have a fascinating pair of guests on this episode.

First, we have Patricia Cornwell.

And we’ve actually had her on before.

And she has another novel she’s going to tell us about.

And she not only talked about dead people, talks about dead people and the science behind the crimes that are involved, she also took that to space.

And so that’s why we’ve got her on this show.

But she’s a novelist.

And she came to the subject as a journalist.

But now we have a novelist who started writing novels because he was actually a medical examiner.

All right.

This is his guy’s expertise, Jonathan Hayes.

Dr.

Jonathan Hayes, welcome to StarTalk.

Thanks, Neil.

Yeah, it’s a pleasure.

Wow.

So you came to the writing profession having started as a sort of professional of dead people.

What is your official sort of title other than sort of you work in the medical examiner’s office, but what does someone call you as a profession, as a scientific profession?

My scientific title is I’m a forensic pathologist.

And pathologist is a physician who makes diagnoses by examining samples taken from patients and that may be a blood sample or if you have a weird mole, you’ll do a biopsy.

It’s a pathologist who looks at an under microscope.

The pathologist is also the physicians who do autopsies.

An autopsy is an examination of the body after death and it’s carried out in order to get as much information as possible about the cause and the circumstances of that death.

And it starts by looking at the outside of the body.

The body is examined for scars or tattoos or identifying marks and for evidence of disease or injury.

And the body is opened and examined internally.

We’ll examine all the organs.

We’ll place the remains of the organs back in the body and we may do some additional testing, for example, looking for drugs or maybe some DNA testing.

If there are any injuries internally, we’ll document those too.

And then we’ll perform, we’ll prepare an autopsy report.

So that’s basically what a pathologist does.

Now, I’m a forensic pathologist and that’s a sub-specialty of pathology.

And forensic pathologists do autopsies on the victims of violent, unnaturally suspicious deaths.

So on a daily basis, I examine wounds and I interpret wounds.

So if you get shot or stabbed and you get to the ER, the ER docs are going to just be examining you to try and save your life.

They’re not going to interpret the wounds.

They may have guesses at what’s next, but that’s the area of expertise of the pathologist, the forensic pathologist.

And so on a daily basis, I’m looking at wounds and trying to interpret those wounds and what actually happens in the person.

Now, how often, doctor, do you examine someone who has been felled by gunshot and your determination is, oh, they didn’t die of a gunshot wound?

That has yet to happen.

Gunshot wounds tend to be fairly lethal.

Gunshot wounds are far more likely to be lethal than most other types of injury.

For example, you’re five times more likely to die if you’re shot than if you’re stabbed.

Look at that.

OK, so that puts on the table the very question.

Let’s say it’s not a gunshot wound, where you have the easy statistics on that.

But if two people just sort of got into a fight and then one person ultimately dies, is it important that you find out the actual thing that killed the person?

Does that even matter if the person’s dead and they have multiple injuries that sort of lead up to it?

It’s critically important that we find out exactly why the person is dead.

That’s our raison d’être.

We have to know exactly why the person died.

Because you would be surprised at the complexities of the questions that arise, the legal questions and the medical questions, when someone dies, particularly in an altercation or a fight.

So we spend a lot of time getting it right and we have endless debates about the exact wording of the death certificate.

Is what you do filmed?

No, we document our findings photographically.

Occasionally you will find video documentation of a prime scene, there will be a video walkthrough, but the autopsy itself is not filmed.

Why not?

Because I don’t know, I’m sure there will be a lot of extremist information, an autopsy can be long, for example, a typical autopsy, say you have a 40 year old man who is jogging on a treadmill at his gym and collapses, at autopsy you need to spot something straightforward like heart disease, which is the most likely cause of death there, at autopsy it will take about an hour, but if you have a complex case like a child abuse case, a fatal child abuse case, those can take a couple of days, so it’s a long period of time.

Also I don’t think anyone likes to be closely monitored while they’re doing their work, because it’s sitting in…

Well, here’s why I ask, I mean, presumably forensic pathology has come a long way over the decades.

There might be things in ten years someone would know to look for that you don’t yet know to look for, because the field has not advanced to that point.

Wouldn’t it be good if we could reopen the videos and have a third party do the autopsy based on the video, as though they were your eyes looking at the same body?

I understand what you’re saying, but the thing is, when you say that forensic pathology has come a long way, it really hasn’t.

I mean, a stab wound in 2021 looks like a stab wound in 1921 or a stab wound in 1821.

And we do document things very thoroughly.

We take a lot of photographs.

I mean, I suppose you could put on some sort of virtual reality headset and video record and have some sort of three-dimensional interactive thing going on there.

But I don’t think that’s sort of…

You know, perhaps, obviously, you’re now talking about unknown unknowns, so I don’t really know the answer to that question.

But I think it would be terribly cumbersome to try and have a video camera and documenting every single step of the autopsy.

So is what you’re saying that for what you do, it really is the fact that we continue to kill each other kind of the same way.

We don’t really get that creative when it comes to killing each other.

Well, you’d be surprised.

I mean, one of the things, I’ve been doing this work for over 30 years now, and every week I see something I’ve never seen before.

And it’s not so much in terms of the homicides, it’s also much the murders.

Murder is murder.

People have knives and guns and baseball bats and whatnot.

It’s more just the peculiar circumstances, the peculiar things that people get, you know, positions that people get themselves into.

There will always be something at a death scene that you can’t explain.

Oh, that’s fascinating, actually.

Now, I don’t know that you can major in forensic pathology in college, so what does one major in?

Is it pre-med?

Yes.

What are some of the trackings that get to where you are?

It’s to become a forensic pathologist, you go to college, you do pre-med, you go to medical school, then after graduating medical school, you do at least three to five years of pathology residency, then you do a one-year forensic training, which I did in Miami.

Wow.

And then all of a sudden, 12 years after you began, you’re a forensic pathologist.

Now, I work in a medical examiner system.

Medical examiner is a physician who’s specialized in forensic pathology.

It’s not in an elected position, and we investigate deaths, violent and actually suspicious deaths for a city or a jurisdiction.

You’re Quincy.

I’ve actually never watched that show.

I used to watch that show when I was a kid, man.

Quincy was the best.

Jack Klugman, man.

He used to walk around, he would eat sandwiches.

He would eat sandwiches during the autopsy.

See, the guy was great, man.

I enjoy a good sandwich, but no one eats it in the autopsy room.

It’s not the sort of place you sit down and go, this is an appetizing place to enjoy.

So what of this training and your life experience did you feel compelled to put into your novel?

Do I have Precious Blood, A Hard Death?

Precious Blood was the first one, and A Hard Death was the second.

The first is, like I think in most novelists, it’s a very semi-autobiographical, I should say.

It’s set in New York City after 9-11.

It’s a serial killer story.

But I used a lot of my day-to-day experiences.

We don’t really talk about our cases in its natural medical privacy.

But I wanted to talk about the things I’ve seen and the things that disturbed and upset me.

So I put a lot of that into the book.

9-11 is one of the things that disturbed and upset me.

My work after that, our work in this office for eight solid months, and just trying to identify people.

That was the hardest part of my life, I think.

Absolutely.

But I tried to make the description of what forensics is and what it feels like to be in a mall and the smell and the sights of death.

I tried to make them realistic.

And I think I did a pretty good job.

So let me ask you this, since you just brought this up.

I don’t want to get super personal, but you kind of broached the subject here.

How do you deal with all this kind of morose, just depressing information that you’re absorbing almost daily?

Well, the last few years have made it pretty hard to stay positive about anything.

But I think, you know, it’s been my experience that human beings do do terrible things to each other.

But also, for the most part, when given the opportunity, people do the right thing.

And I recognize that the murders I see, they’re the exceptions.

And though there may be horrible crimes indeed on a daily basis, most people are trying to do the right thing.

All right.

It’s hope prevails, I think, is how we think about that.

So what’s interesting, if we contrast Jonathan, your pathway into writing novels with that of Patricia Cornwell, who is shared with us some of what inspires her when she approaches a novel that needs a bit of forensic pathology to make it run.

Let’s check it out.

What we’re really talking about is exploration.

We’re exploring, which is exactly why we want to go to the moon and do all those cool things.

If you’re going to be an artist, you need to explore and go out and let it tell you what the story is, let it tell you what the painting is.

James McNeil Whistler, he had this boat one who would take him out in this flat bottom boat and the Thames at dusk.

He would look, he’d stand there on the filthy Thames in the Victorian era and look at what the light was doing.

He’d remember that.

Then he would go back and he would paint something evocative because he was there and you feel he was there.

You feel Hemingway was in the places that he’s talking about.

And I very much encourage to people, here’s my, I have three words for everybody.

Just show up.

Never know what you might find.

So I like that because what you’re saying is that to really, not to put words in your mouth, but to infuse a story with a certain authenticity.

It can’t be just things you’ve read about or heard about.

If you experience them firsthand, they manifest differently, even in your sentences and in the words you choose.

And your emotional investment becomes that much deeper.

Is that a fair accounting of what you just told me?

That’s absolutely right.

You want to invoke your senses.

I mean, why go into a morgue if you can just see a video of an autopsy?

Because when your senses are assaulted by everything in there, it is a totally different thing.

It’s as different as reality from virtual reality, probably even more so.

And for example, I can remember how shocked I would feel when I would go down there to scribe for the medical examiners and I would put on the gloves and, you know, this was back in the day when we didn’t get in spacesuits like they do today with hazmat and all that.

And I would put my hands on the body on the table or I’d lean on it while I’m jotting down whatever they’re telling me.

And it’s like as cold as marble because, and you would be amazed over and over again about things that you would not have emotional reactions to it if you didn’t feel it and you weren’t there or you didn’t see it or you weren’t standing there when the state trooper is looking through the woman’s wallet.

She was hit by a car on her way home from the bar about three o’clock in the morning.

And, you know, nobody really knew what she’d gone there for or why.

And she was by herself such a bad hour.

And he’s going through her wallet and he finds a little fortune from a fortune cookie that she had saved.

And it said you will soon have an encounter that will change the course of your life.

So she’s going off to a bar to meet her encounter, not thinking it’s going to be a car.

And you look at these things and you don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

But you do know, I feel this, if I don’t go and see those things, I have no right to write about them.

So, Jonathan, you probably feel the same way, right?

Because your writing emanates from your firsthand experiences, good and bad.

Yeah, I think that in terms of the sensual aspects, the smells, the sounds, the sights, yeah, there’s no substitute for firsthand experience.

Then again, I mean, look at speculative fiction.

In science fiction, people use their imaginations and think, what would it be like to see this or to experience that?

And I think that’s really rich, too.

In some ways, knowing what the truth is kind of, at some level, deadens the fantasy, you know.

I don’t take any, in my own writing, I don’t take any liberties with the science because I can’t.

I wouldn’t lie about it.

And that limits what you can do with the set of facts in front of you.

And so, that’s one of the reasons I really enjoy a show like CSI, which was said before.

It’s not so much forensic science as forensic science fiction.

I think they take the principles of forensic science and they make it more glamorous and they speed it up.

They put sexy lighting on it.

And the end result, I think it may not get the technical accuracy of the forensic science, but it gets the romance of the science.

And I really do like that.

And it’s for that reason, I think CSI has been great because it’s attracted a lot of people into forensics.

This is a field that really needs good people, but smart young people.

So what you’re saying is you, when you’re exploring the fiction of your storytelling, it’s in the whatever relationships led to the crime, you’re not in a position to sort of stretch any other science.

I say that only because we look at a Stephen King novel, often he touches on supernatural forces and leaves them a little bit cloaked, but something manifests and then adds another dimension that people seem to like to watch and even read about.

But you’re sticking to the facts on this one.

Well, that’s just in my writing, and I wouldn’t rule out writing fantasy or horror novel or something like that.

But even if I do, if the whale cuts someone’s throat, I want to accurately depict the spray of blood or what have you.

And so when I watch a lot of crime stuff, sometimes it’s at a procedural level.

Like, the cops wouldn’t do that or wouldn’t say that.

For example, when I’m watching a horror movie or a crime movie and they visit a crime scene three days later and all the blood is still bright red, that’s upsetting to me because blood goes brown and then it goes black.

It just looks so fake.

But I understand.

Since I’ve written fiction myself, I understand the challenges of creating something interesting and riveting.

And I understand people taking liberties with the facts.

I don’t think Patty Cornwell does that because she too knows what it’s like.

So guys, we’ve got to take a quick break.

When we come back, we’re going to find out how Patricia ends up putting her crime in space.

Apparently, Earth wasn’t good enough.

Let’s put people in space and have them commit crimes there, where you then need some more forensic pathology to figure out what the hell is going on when StarTalk returns.

Hey, I’m Roy Hill Percival, and I support StarTalk on Patreon.

Bringing the universe down to Earth, this is StarTalk with Neil 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.

We’ve got Dr.

Jonathan Hayes, who’s not only a 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.

He didn’t say sexy, he said romantic.

That’s different.

I think sexy is right, too.

Yeah, you know, I’m sorry, Neil.

Excuse me.

Unfortunately, for me, my romance leads to sexy.

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?

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 upfront.

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 like you want to be like them in the series Crime Scene Investigation in CSI.

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, you know, 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.

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?

Their boyfriends, girlfriends, relationship problems.

So they’re fully fleshed out characters.

So Jonathan, are you a fully fleshed out character?

How does that work at the bar?

Some would say, hey, what do you do?

I study dead bodies.

That’s a short conversation, it might seem to me.

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 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 True Crime, 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 really catches the imagination of people.

And I think it’s because at some level, in the old days, a hero was a guy with muscles who knew how to handle a gun.

And 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 scientist becomes a good hero.

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 projectiles somebody might use if you were going to do that?

And 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, the whole point is, my little mantra these days is 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?

What happens?

So people will be 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 talk to NASA people about this, you know, I talk to Jack Fisher, the astronaut who was up there for a while, and we talked about what blood would do and fluids and…

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, if where you’ve got a scene where something like this has occurred and some astronauts, you know, come and will use the dream chaser.

I know it’s not crude yet, but it probably will be.

And they, you know, 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?

Yeah, Jonathan, this brings up an interesting question.

You are completely trained for Earth-based crimes, that is, crimes operating under the sort of 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 is 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.

Perhaps not when it comes to things like the space station.

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 they’ll be at normal gravity and the traditional medical examiner role is going to be pretty much the same.

I think it will 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.

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 drop that spatter dynamics are going to be different.

Because, you know, you’ve probably seen 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, 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.

But 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, what, 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 full planets?

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 has been dead are not available to you, right?

You’re absolutely right.

And how quickly will people bleed from an open wound if there’s zero gravity?

Right, right, right.

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 when you have a frozen body, it’s like trying to chip into an iceberg.

You’re not going to get very far.

So what you have to do is thaw the body, and of course, as you thaw the body, the body begins to break down fairly rapidly.

Of course, in space, I think there may also be issues of desiccation, the body drying up very quickly, and there are questions of barotrauma, and dealing with this far more about this than I do, where the body is subjected to tremendous pressures out in the vacuum of space or removed from the vacuum of space.

So, when we do start to see it, it will be interesting, but I think I may retire before that happens.

I want to retire relevant.

I have to ask, 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 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 enough.

So, in the early stages, when rigor first comes in, you will start to see a little bit of goose flesh developing, and you see these tiny little muscles pulling up.

Wait, wait, just to be clear, you are on a first-name basis with rigor mortis, OK?

You call it rigor.

Yeah, rigor mortis, it sits a little longer.

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.

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, we test in the fingers first, then we test in the jaw, and then the arms, etc.

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.

Now, 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.

And separately, 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.

But wait, 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 on to, 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.

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 temporarily stiff.

We don’t use that expression.

You’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.

I’m just going to say, Jonathan, I don’t think they’ll be offended.

And if they are, who are they going to tell?

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?

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 turn the body and what to check for.

I think I could do that.

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

Yeah, exactly.

So you could do this from the beach while they’re up there doing the hard work.

In theory, but there’s no real substitute for seeing with your own eyes.

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.

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 down in the morgue?

I always wondered what that is.

We don’t use those anymore.

I’m sorry about that.

Oh, come on.

No, bring them back.

We need them.

The 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.

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 girdies for transporting the bodies on.

The only time we see those draw type…

He means meat locker.

Chuck, did I hear him say meat locker?

That’s exactly what he said.

I was going to say, I hope to God it’s not like my local restaurant.

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 in StarTalk Return.

We’re back with Jonathan Hayes, 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, I was saying…

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 a very efficient way to handle the space, and they’re easy to clean.

But 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 is to rent trucks, and they rented some refrigerator trucks, and 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.

That’s not a 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.

I am so disappointed now.

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.

To slay a beautiful theory with an ugly fact.

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.

Yeah.

No, the bodies are stored in a shelving system with it.

It’s all very modular and very efficient.

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.

So what would that be?

Your question, Chuck.

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.

The 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 will be called purge fluid, and that will spill out around the body, and sometimes it will soak through the ceiling.

Holy crap.

I know, it’s not an attractive thing.

Yeah, that’s terrible.

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 actually starts to float up to the top.

So there may be a delay between someone drowning and us actually finding the bodies.

There’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, bodies that are floating tend to impede the fight.

Sometimes they get clothing traps and air, or they may have swallowed some air and they can float because of that.

Okay, so just to be very precise, because you’re breaking down this whole evolution of a dead body, 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 fleshing out the full picture here.

So this is highly illuminating for me.

Thank you.

No, I mean, clearly you’re on top of this stuff.

You should have gone into forensic medicine, rather than master of physics.

You could have used people like you.

So, oh, 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, yes.

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?

So, we put Jonathan together with the TV series, how to commit a perfect 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.

Viola Davis, the star.

Somebody’s going down.

Somebody’s going down.

Viola 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?

Good answer.

You should just stop there.

Don’t say anything else.

No, I should.

I think it would be possible to kill someone without leaving any clues or trace.

But it is true.

I have no intention of ever 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.

I’m going to tell you, I murdered my wife and I buried her in the basement.

Wow.

So CSI solved the crime.

Even though it did.

CSI also creates problems because now for a while, at least when the show was on the air all the time and everyone loved it, there’s six different variations.

I think CBS is actually bringing it back.

But the juries began to demand higher levels of visual proof.

They wanted more sort of glamorous animations and like this incredible cutting edge science which as I said is on the border of science fiction.

And by the way, CSI wasn’t just medical.

There was also some physics involved in 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.

So 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.

So it was a big force on the television landscape.

So 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 I think 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.

And 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 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.

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 with your mobile phones.

I mean, we’ve created many computers that people really almost can’t function without.

So so Jonathan, is there can you picture a day where AI conducts the investigation and not you?

I think this system would be would be closer.

I don’t think AI will ever be.

For example, things like an autopsy, not all bodies are the same.

Every body has numerous different idiosyncrasies, a very subtle little anatomic differences in structure and actually examining the body is a very complex thing.

It’s visually, sometimes olfactory, and then it’s, you know, the touch and the feeling of actually putting your hands in and examining the length of the wound, etc.

I think there will be a long time before there’s, you know, robots or whatever that are sensitive enough 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.

I think there’s less room for observer bias then.

But for a long time, those robots will have to be overseen by, you know, someone human to see if they haven’t gone hopelessly off the rails.

I think the AI will be useful in things like in the crime scene.

There is a thousand, there’s a million things going on in the 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.

And 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?

I think with pattern recognition, 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 do think it’s a long time before we’ll be able to rely on AI.

For 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 their 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 it’s a subdural hematoma rather than say meningitis that you’re looking at.

So I think there’s going to be, it’s going to be a while before that sort of technology comes in and plays a specifically a guiding or a controlling part.

Well, you sound like Chuck, because I said this of 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 future.

Oh, absolutely.

There’s no way, 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 for me.

That’s called murder, Chuck.

Robotic side.

There’s a word for it.

Robotic side.

Oh, what?

Robotic side.

I don’t know if you can kill someone that’s inanimate, but that’s a philosophical discussion for another forum, I think.

But 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, and then actually trying to have to formulate a response?

That’s a really good example, I think.

And even just in the Turing test, if the computer to pass the Turing test is still, well, that’s a lot less challenging than it was before.

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, go away, I’m busy, or come back later, or f*** you asshole, 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.

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 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.

That’s how I think it will unroll.

I mean, when I first started, when I first came to New York, 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, so we’d be working off for the scene investigation.

I didn’t go to the scenes, but we’d get, the investigating detectors would show up at like six or seven Polaroids of 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 the room and just scans the entire room, very blade runner machine, scans the entire room and measures all the distances and can rebuild the model of that room.

And that’s fascinating technology.

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 their houses, 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 in CSI, Gill and Brissell will walk into the scene and then he’ll pick up a single fragment of glass and a whole field filled with glass and say, well, this just doesn’t fit.

This is the problem.

And that is the answer.

It just doesn’t work like that, sadly.

But if that were Sherlock Watson, the AI, Sherlock Watson, the AI would be able to do that.

Yeah, they would.

Sherlock Watson, Sherlock Watson would walk in and just be like, this man’s been dead for 12 hours.

12 hours and 36 minutes.

Right.

They were 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.

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 I, you know, you know how fallible computers are, you know, it’s still, they still depend on, I think, for a very long time and maybe forever, they’re going to need humans to sign off on them, but they haven’t got them, Mr.

Crumb.

And of course, that reintroduces the whole question of bias, which is one of the big challenges.

Yeah, of course, of course.

Right.

Well, once again, Sherlock Watson sends another black man to jail.

Damn.

Chuck.

That means it’s time to end.

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.

But I’m delighted.

Have you been invited to the other forensic pathologists 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.

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.

And we’ll ask a few months as we watch 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.

So the whole decomposition arc will be very different because of that, because it’s not really soil.

But that’s all you need, though.

We carry, 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.

The rate-limiting thing there is going to be cold, and it’s also going to be water.

Bacteria, most bacteria like a little bit of warmth and water to germinate.

Jonathan, delight to have you on.

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.