“He was unknown 1, I gave him a face. So I revolutionized DNA analysis”

He is the man who revolutionized DNA analysis. Emiliano Giardina, forensic geneticist and lecturer at the University of Tor Vergata, allowed the investigators to trace Massimo Giuseppe Bossetti thanks to the visionary intuition of looking for Ignoto 1 among the illegitimate children of Giuseppe Guerinoni, the driver of Gorno who died in 1999. The murder of Yara Gambirasio – with millions of euros spent in years of investigations and 18 thousand genetic analyzes – and the following life sentence for Bossetti mark the beginning of a new era for the biological traces of crime news. “Since that moment the conception of DNA has changed in the collective imagination, people have understood the importance of genetic investigations”, explains the 46-year-old Roman Giardina. What does Bossetti’s DNA in leggings and panties reveal about the type of contact he had with Yara? “In fact nothing, DNA indicates presence, not responsibility. Finding it in those points, however, provides a trace of an intimate and particular contact. Well, that material was not on a glove”. After that futuristic investigation, unique in the world, was it impossible to acquit the bricklayer from Mapello? “I don’t think so. The three levels of the trial make judicial error difficult and in that case it wasn’t just the DNA. The prosecution had other elements”. What is the future of scientific investigative investigations? “On the one hand there is the miniaturization of the laboratory, which allows genetic analyzes to be carried out in the field with super tools such as the Rapid. On the other hand, the phenotyping of the DNA. Until now, biological material was used to confirm a traditional investigative hypothesis , already with the Yara case we have taken the next step: I have not investigated and I am looking for him with DNA. So from an unknown and absent trace in the national database we can go back to the color of the eyes, of the hair, of the height “. How many individual traces does the national DNA database contain? There is no …