Study on DNA from a shawl purportedly belonging to a victim doesn't prove anything, geneticists say.
A member of staff poses stands in front of a screen showing a short movie about Jack the Ripper during a press preview for the exhibition"Jack the Ripper and the East End" at the Museum in Docklands, London.
News media was buzzing today with a claim that scientists had finally figured out the real identity of the notorious 19th century serial killer Jack the Ripper thanks to DNA and an old shawl. The only problem? Archaeological geneticists say the research is neither new nor scientifically accurate.
Testing the forensic stains led Louhelainen and Miller to write that"the completed DNA sequences displayed an overall match for both the suspect candidate and the victim. This suggests that the stains originated from a single source. In other words, the victim's stains are from one individual, and stains linked to the suspect are similarly from a single person."
The researchers claim that this is"the most systematic and most advanced genetic analysis to date regarding the Jack the Ripper murders." They also say that they show that"the presence of mtDNA on the shawl matches the female victim's mtDNA derived from stains on it and that mtDNA also on the shawl matches the suspect candidate's mtDNA.
Bringing the study full circle, the researchers conclude that"all the data collected support the hypothesis that the shawl contains biological material from Catherine Eddowes and that the mtDNA sequences obtained from semen stains match the sequences of one of the main police suspects,While the study appears solid on its surface, archaeological geneticists immediately picked apart the science and criticized media coverage of Louhelainen and Miller's work.
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