Were you theeeere?" is Ken Ham's suggested response for students to give to teachers who are trying to teach REAL science.
Well, no, we weren't. But by the same token, most crimes go unwitnessed, yet juries are able to reach a consensus by examining the evidence presented at the trial.
In 2002, gastroenterologist Dr. Schmidt gave one of the nurses from his office in Louisiana an injection of what he claimed was vitamin B. Several months later, the nurse started feeling ill. Bloodwork revealed that she had contracted HIV.
An article in Scientific American reveals how evolution was used to help convict Schmidt of attempted murder:
I was fortunate to be invited to participate in Louisiana v. Schmidt as a scientist and expert witness by Michael L. Metzker of the Baylor College of Medicine and David M. Hillis of the University of Texas at Austin. The three of us worked together on the molecular analyses. The uncontested facts in the case are that a gastroenterologist broke into the home of his former office nurse and mistress and gave her an injection. He claimed it was a vitamin B shot. She claimed it was HIV. She had begun feeling ill several months after the injection and a blood test revealed that she had become infected with HIV, at which point she went to the district attorney's office to file charges. The DA's detectives quickly obtained a search warrant for the physician's office, where they seized his record books and a vial of blood from a refrigerator. The physician said that the blood sample, drawn from one of his HIV-positive patients, was for his own research.
The next logical step in the investigation was to perform phylogenetic analyses of the HIV lineages from the nurse and the alleged source. My collaborators and I selected two HIV genes to sequence, one relatively fast-evolving, encoding part of the viral envelope (env), the other slow, encoding a vital enzyme called reverse transcriptase (RT). We also had blood samples from about 30 other infected individuals to serve as a reference point.
Our analyses of the env gene showed the HIV sequences from the victim and the doctor's sample formed two sister clades relative to the epidemiological sample. The likelihood of two random people from the infected population having such similar viruses is extremely small. This result is consistent with the accusation that the physician used the blood sample from one of his patients to infect the nurse, but it could also be that the patient was infected with HIV from the nurse. The phylogeny inferred from the more slowly evolving RT sequences showed that viruses from the victim were younger, arising from within the clade of viruses from the alleged source. This result clearly indicated that viruses from the alleged source had infected the nurse. -David P. Mindell
No witnesses were present when Schmidt drew up that injection of HIV virus for his nurse. Still, from the evidence produced at the trial, the jury found Schmidt guilty. He is currently serving a 50-year prison sentence.
This edition of Scientific American has oodles of good evolution reading; this particular article "Putting Evolution to Use in the Everyday World" explains in more detail how we've used evolution to help in common situations.
Just because we weren't "there" doesn't mean we can't know anything about the situation.
posted by Cheryl Shepherd-Adams
