Why DNA fingerprint's creator is destroying his brainchild

Dr. Pavel Ivanov is the architect of the DNA fingerprinting technique. This revolutionary method, developed in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet countries, analyzes the unique genetic patterns in our DNA, which is akin to a biological barcode unique to each individual. He received global recognition for his work, but for the last dozen years, he has been fighting his very own creation, which a corrupt Russian government uses to punish innocent people.

At one point, it might have seemed that this crazy story could have a happy ending. On the afternoon of August 18, 2011, geneticist Pavel Ivanov, a tall, slim man with sunken cheeks, gray hair, and a mustache, looking much younger than his 56 years, stood at the podium in the Tagansky District Court in the center of Moscow and testified as an expert. Ivanov's sly, sometimes boyish squint, thin-framed glasses, and sarcastic smile make him look nothing like a person associated with forensics. Still, rather like a kind field surgeon: you wouldn't even be upset when he amputates your leg.

Professor Pavel Ivanov is the deputy director of the Russian Center for Forensic Medical Examination of the Ministry of Health and the head of the specialized center for molecular genetic examinations. He is involved in almost all high-profile events covered by the Russian press. He identified bodies after the accident at the Sayano-Shushenskaya HPP, the explosions of residential buildings in Moscow in 1999, the victims of all known terrorist attacks, the remains of the murdered Ukrainian journalist Georgiy Gongadze, identified the body of Major General of Police Gennady Shpigun kidnapped in 1999 in Grozny, flew to identify the Russian crew of the crashed Sukhoi Superjet in Jakarta, identified the royal remains of the Romanov family killed by the Bolsheviks. Ivanov came to court to explain that the forensic examination underlying the criminal case was incorrect. In the dock was a minor official of the Ministry of Transport, Vladimir Makarov, accused of violent sexual acts against his underage daughter, Elina.

The evidence is as follows: Elina's drawing, depicting a woman with a giant cat's tail, and the conclusion of a psychologist — which she calls her "big blunder" — the tail "indirectly indicates that the girl was in a sexual relationship with a significant adult." The second piece of evidence — is from the Saint Vladimir Hospital, which stated that spermatozoa were found in Elina Makarova's urine. The third piece of evidence — an examination by Maya Isaenko from the Moscow Department of Health's Bureau of Forensic Medical Examination: the expert did not find sperm in the physical evidence but concluded that this indicates a low sperm count in the original object of study — "below the sensitivity threshold of the analysis methods used." A gynecological examination of the girl by five Ministry of Health specialists revealed no injuries. Pavel Ivanov and his colleagues conducted a second forensic DNA examination, after which Makarova was supposed to be released from Butyrka pre-trial detention center: according to their conclusion, sperm was not found either in the contents of the vagina or on the girl's panties and T-shirt, as the investigation insists. "The presence of genetic material from Makarov V.V. is excluded," their conclusion states.

"The results obtained during the examination are unsuitable for interpretation. They are poor," Ivanov told the judge in his calm voice. — "We show similar results to our students as unsuccessful or impossible to interpret. It's astonishing! There's nothing here, not even a hint. The conclusion, so to speak, is taken out of thin air. There are only two options. Either the expert is incompetent — but that cannot be. She has seventeen years of experience and is my student. She defended her dissertation with me..."

Ivanov was not allowed to name the second option: he wanted to say that if an expert is competent and does such work, he is a corrupt scoundrel.
"What a strange situation," the prosecutor said. She says she saw it, but you say it's not visible."
— "Well, that's your job to question her!" — Ivanov suddenly raised his voice. — "I'm telling you a fact: there's nothing here. And if someone says otherwise, they are either non-specialists or biased."

A verbal skirmish ensued in the courtroom. The prosecutor was surprised that experts slandered each other; someone just snickers. Ivanov approached the judge and clearly showed the difference between the two examinations, and at some point, even had to explain: please, but after all, I created the entire Russian DNA examination industry, I wrote these methodological guides you are arguing about, I conducted the country's first DNA examination, I know what I'm talking about. This is my brainchild!

At some point, he got the feeling that the judge understood everything and that everything would be fine and the court, under the pressure of facts, would make a reasonable decision, but that did not happen: Vladimir Makarov was declared a pedophile and sentenced to 13 years in prison.

Several years later, in his office №303 in the north of Moscow, Pavel Ivanov, leaning back in his chair, says that the Makarov case is just a litmus test; there are worse cases that aren't written about. The office is dimly lit, the desk is cluttered with papers, and all surfaces are covered with analysis results and examinations. Here's a photograph of a rusty knuckleduster wrapped in insulating tape: the killer smashed the skull with it, wiped off the blood, but left micro traces on the handle and was imprisoned. Near the door, an antigravitational globe levitates on a nightstand; the computer screen saver shows the U.N. flag waving at sunset. Ivanov reinstalls this screensaver on every new computer he gets. Ivanov wears a white coat, likes to make faces when talking on the phone, and gets so carried away with his story that it's impossible to interrupt.

Ivanov says that the method of molecular genetic examination has become entrenched in the public consciousness over more than twenty years as irrefutable evidence, as the ultimate truth. When the technique appeared, the worst thing that could happen was that, since the research is complex, a specialist could make a mistake, and this ended tragically, as courts make decisions based on these data.
"We wrote about it, warned, and tried to correct mistakes. But now, I'm not afraid of this word; I see a qualitative transition when we see the work of a formally competent expert. I don't want to say that it is falsified, but its result is incorrect. A competent specialist did it the way it should not have been done. We are increasingly facing this, and I don't know what it's related to."

Ivanov compares what's happening to cancer: "very diverse, different causes, only at the final stage the symptoms are the same: an examination that does not meet the requirements of reliability." It turns out, Ivanov says, everything is rotten, the mechanism intended to administer justice does not work as it should, and innocent people are imprisoned: "We tried to improve everything, but it didn't work out. And I'm starting to fear what it's coming to in our country."

The professor embarks on a warpath with his brainchild.

I. Origins of Soviet DNA Fingerprint

Professor Pavel Ivanov was born in Moscow on July 27, 1955, into a military family. He graduated from a mathematical school, and in the evenings, he went to classes in the scientific town of Dolgoprudny near Moscow at the Physical-Technical Institute. In his youth, he burned patterns on wood, disassembled machinery, could even change pistons in a Zhiguli engine, and loved bike trips. He graduated from the biology faculty of Moscow State University, the Department of Molecular Biology, specializing in "biochemistry."

Famous psychologist Alexander Kolmanovsky, a classmate and close friend of Ivanov, fondly remembers the young scientist as combining "maturity, charisma, and masculinity on the one hand, and sensitivity and a sense of humor on the other." According to Kolmanovsky, Ivanov was athletic and physically resilient, cheerful, participated in an interfaculty agitation brigade, traveled a lot with it around the USSR, and once even dragged Kolmanovsky to a construction team in Norilsk for grueling work at a cement plant. Kolmanovsky assures that young Ivanov did not understand what he wanted to do; at some point, friends even thought about transferring to the Second Medical to study to be surgeons. "The career he made surprised our classmates," says Kolmanovsky. — "Pasha was a grasping student and honestly approached his studies; everything came to him without much effort, but he did not make an academic impression, like some of our classmates, about whom they said: here are the future scientists. He just wasn't particularly captivated by it." In 1978, Ivanov graduated from Moscow State University, wrote a thesis at the Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, completed his postgraduate studies there in 1983, and remained to work.

Candidate of Biological Sciences Ivanov became a scientist and studied the structure and functioning of human genes. However, fundamental science depressed him: He jokes that you must look into a microscope, and colleagues will tell you, "It's all nonsense. You didn't discover a new protein, so better look into a microscope." But most importantly, it was unclear when the accumulated knowledge could bring any real benefit.

Meanwhile, an academic revolution that unexpectedly changed world forensics's structure began abroad.

On the morning of September 10, 1984, it took British geneticist Alec Jeffreys from the University of Leicester thirty minutes to realize that he had just accidentally made a revolutionary scientific discovery. Jeffreys and his colleagues were studying myoglobin, a protein that transports muscle oxygen. Initially, they intended to develop a technique for cutting out a small DNA fragment for further study. Laboratory research led to Jeffreys comparing X-ray images of his colleagues' and their families' DNA in his laboratory at 9:05 am on September 10 and discovered a section of DNA that was unique to different people. Jeffreys stumbled upon individually specific DNA markers (probes) that allowed distinguishing not just different species from each other but also person A from person B and, importantly, trace familial connections between people. Half an hour later, the stunned Jeffreys and his partners compiled a list of areas where the discovery would be helpful to establishing paternity, studying identical twins, control, immigration disputes, and, finally, forensics. Within a few months, Jeffreys' method was tested in several civil court cases; in July 1985, Jeffreys' article "Individually specific 'fingerprints' of human DNA" was published in the journal Nature, and worldwide fame fell upon him. "When we made the discovery, we didn't expect such an effect," Professor Sir Jeffreys, still working at the University of Leicester, replied by e-mail. — "The 26-year history of DNA fingerprinting is astonishing."

The Engelhardt Institute, through the Academy of Sciences, received the journal Nature, and Pavel Ivanov and his colleagues immediately became familiar with Jeffreys' work. "This work, of course, excited molecular biologists — with its pioneering nature, consistency, but also because it almost immediately became applied," Ivanov recalls. Two years later, in 1986, Ivanov and his colleagues stumbled upon a pattern similar to Jeffreys' discovery during their research. At first, the scientists thought they had replicated the Briton's discovery. Still, after corresponding with him and asking him to send samples of his probes, they realized that they had discovered a similar but own molecular probe that did not fall under the British patent. Ivanov was offered to create his laboratory after a meeting at the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences with representatives from the Ministry of Health, KGB, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Meanwhile, the global practice of DNA identification reached an entirely new level.

On January 22, 1988, baker Colin Pitchfork became the first person in the world to be sentenced to prison using DNA fingerprinting. Pitchfork raped and killed two underage girls in Leicestershire three years apart. The local police suspected that the killer was one, but a 17-year-old boy came to them and confessed to the murder of the second girl but flatly denied killing the first. The investigators turned to Alec Jeffreys, and the scientist found out that one person indeed killed the girls, but not the boy. The investigative team collected blood samples from all the men living in the county; the scientists studied the collected material for half a year and did not find any matches, as if no one had killed anyone. Pitchfork was accidentally betrayed by a colleague from the bakery, whom he bribed to give blood in his place. Pitchfork is still serving a life sentence, took up art and sculpture, and constantly applies for parole.

And Pavel Ivanov was happy to get away from the institute: when he saw the research results, he immediately realized that this was, finally, what he had been waiting for all his life. "It was a challenge. I was fascinated by methodological tasks, and here you immediately see a practical effect," Ivanov says. — "You feel needed by humanity; in my youth, it was a strong drive! We will imprison all criminals and release all the innocent." At 32, the professor finally found himself.

And the first test did not take long to wait.

II. A double murder-raping case

In the archives of the district court of the small industrial town of Ivanovo, all materials of case №2-10 involving the maniac Sopov were destroyed due to the expiration of the statute of limitations. The only thing remaining was a copy of the verdict of January 18, 1989. On the evening of May 11, 1988, a 24-year-old unemployed drifter named Sopov walked to his shack through a forest on the outskirts of Kineshma, Ivanovo region. Two months earlier, the non-partisan Sopov was released from a correctional labor colony, and all this time, he lived on the money he received there, in a forest plantation near the Budenny settlement, 100 meters from the Kineshma-Navoloki railway. Sopov led a measured life: he performed poorly in school, had no friends, wandered, stole, and buried the stolen goods in the ground. Sopov saw a 77-year-old woman collecting spruce branches with an ax in the forest. Suddenly, Sopov decided to rape her. The maniac knocked the older woman to the ground, but she resisted; he beat her, removed her underwear, and raped her. According to Sopov himself, as stated in the copy of the verdict, after the rape, the grandmother "scolded" him and promised to go to the police. The young man panicked and strangled the older woman with her headscarf. Then he turned the body face down, lit a fire from leaves between her legs, and fled.

Two hours later, Sopov returned to rape the corpse, but feeling that it was cold, he ran away again—to spend the night near a brick factory. Sopov never returned to his shack and began wandering around the forest. On June 4, Sopov roamed the forest and stumbled upon an 87-year-old woman gathering cinquefoil root in a clearing. Sopov decided to rape her, too but scared the older woman, and she tried to flee. Unsuccessfully: Sopov caught up with her, knocked her to the ground, beat her, raped her, strangled her with a headscarf, and covered the body with grass and branches. Two days later, Sopov settled on the bank of the Kineshemka River: he found two homeless people living in a tent made of polyethylene film and moved in with them. Dirty, overgrown, in torn clothes, and hungry, Sopov was afraid to be seen by people, constantly ran out of the tent at night, slept only during the day, and was fearful of the police. On the morning of June 11, a week after the second murder, Sopov borrowed clothes from the homeless and went for groceries. He never returned to the tent.

That same morning, the body of the second victim was finally found, and the police combed the area of the forest plantation. Sopov was detained by pure chance: a patrolman saw a strange man coming out of the forest, walking along the road, and then turning back into the forest. Sopov was detained for identification—he behaved suspiciously, could not answer any questions, and introduced himself as Smirnov. He was taken to the police station, and his identity was established. The police suspected Sopov had killed the older women but couldn't prove it: the antigens of the sperm found in the victims and Sopov's blood did not match. They were about to release him. However, Investigator Igor Zakharov, who was handling the case, recalled recently reading about Professor Ivanov's discovery in a scientific journal and contacting him through the Main Bureau of Forensic Medical Examination.

Pavel Ivanov had never seen the maniac Sopov. The professor worked in Moscow, and during the few months he verified and re-verified the analyses, he recalls with trepidation: it was frightening, uncomfortable, and unsettling due to the "frighteningly long and frighteningly difficult investigations." The group of scientists with whom Ivanov made the discovery did not work on the criminal case; they preferred to stay within the realm of fundamental science. There was no experience, no technological base—it was necessary to find answers on the fly to the everyday questions of today, for example, how to extract DNA from biological human tissue, considering that the scientist had previously only worked with rats. But even now, he does not doubt that he obtained the correct results and that the answer, even by today's standards, is good, especially considering the technical base of those years.

The evidential base for Sopov's case was built on three examinations. The forensic biological examination merely did not exclude the possibility that the sperm found inside one of the victims belonged to Sopov. The fiber examination showed that the clothing of Sopov and his victims had identical fibers. And, of course, Ivanov's genetic identification examination. This examination was given little space in the verdict, as if it was not the first in the Soviet Union, never used before. Everything is straightforward: the examination states that the sperm found inside the second victim belongs to Sopov. The court deemed the maniac sane, although it saw signs of oligophrenia "to a moderately expressed degree of debility" in him. He was sentenced to 15 years in a penal colony of a strict regime. The fate of Sopov is unknown, but Pavel Ivanov still remembers him: "I bear personal responsibility for this case. And the question of truth always torments me. Nothing will vanish into oblivion."

After the trial, Pavel Ivanov did not wake up famous, unlike Alec Jeffreys: the first DNA identification in the USSR was not covered by the press. However, the professional departments immediately learned about the success. Fame awaited Pavel Ivanov only three years later.

III. How to identify the body

Ivanov's job, simply put, is to identify the body.

For example, when a terrorist attack occurs, Ivanov learns about it immediately through several channels – governmental, special services, and the ministry. At the crime scene, an expert-investigative team is organized, consisting of an investigator, a criminalist, a forensic medical expert, a dog handler, and bomb technicians. The team divides the area into sectors and squares and groups the remains of bodies found nearby. It is necessary to record where body parts were located – a foot, a green sock, a brown boot, and a specific square. Then, death is legally recognized, and the remains are sent to the morgue. Ivanov is not supposed to search for anything on-site; he only needs to advise on the investigation. Then, he and his team must type hundreds of found fragments and distribute them into groups of bodies: whose leg, arm, and generally, how many people are there. Ivanov's team does not work with parts of bodies; they collect biological samples.

Then, it's necessary to understand who is who. In the case of terrorist attacks, this is especially important because it is essential to establish who the suicide bomber was. Biological material, such as blood or a small body fragment, is needed for identification, and non-cellular secretions, such as urine, can also be suitable. However, finding suitable material can be tricky – charred bones do not fit, burned body parts may fit, but not always – thermal effects destroy bacteria and, at the same time, preserve biological tissue. Sometimes, everything rots in water, as with the Sayano-Shushenskaya HPP. According to Ivanov, it's always a choice: "Often the line is right nearby – here everything is burned to ashes, and here, in general, it is not yet."

To identify a body, it needs to be compared with something – preferably with a sample of the person being searched for, but this is a rare case: no one keeps blood, sperm, saliva, sweat, or hair at home. Therefore, geneticists usually use parents' DNA; working with brothers-sisters and other relatives is harder. Most often, relatives have to be established by operatives; sometimes, there's no need to search for anyone – in Jakarta, in May 2012, at the crash site of the Sukhoi Superjet, Ivanov flew with a set of vials of blood from relatives of eight deceased Russians. In this case, the identities of the deceased were known; it was necessary to understand who was who.

Samples A and B are then compared. The result of the multi-stage laboratory analysis Ivanov calls a barcode, a barcode: as information about its origin and price is encrypted in the stripes on products, so here individual features of a person and his familial connections are visible. This picture is the genetic "fingerprint" or DNA fingerprinting. Between samples A and B, identity must be found in the arrangement and number of stripes; the further the kinship, the harder it is to detect identity. Paternity tests are done using this same technique. The work of geneticists over the sites of accidents, disasters, terrorist attacks, and catastrophes can take a very long time. Ivanov says the work on September 11 in the USA is still incomplete.

Due to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ivanov's initiative, which immediately attracted the attention of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the KGB, did not receive the necessary funding. It was a slow journey from laboratory techniques to a full-fledged expert system. And all the difficulties that seem routine today were fully experienced by Ivanov in 1991 when the remains of the executed Romanov royal family were discovered in Ganina Yama in the Sverdlovsk region - the abdicated Emperor Nicholas II, his wife, Empress Alexandra, their children Olga, Anastasia, and Tatiana, as well as their entourage.

IV. The case №18/12366693

The saga with the royal remains lasted eight years for Ivanov (the story lasted 17 years). It drew into its whirlpool top politicians, governments of several countries, the great conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, the Russian Orthodox Church, and a crowd of geneticists, speculators, and theorists. Amid all this chaos, Pavel Ivanov moved from one laboratory to another to answer a straightforward question: are these the remains of the Romanov family or not? Ivanov spent a year and a half at the Aldermaston Centre for Forensic Sciences in the U.K. 199e I went to the United States Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Ivanov recalls those days with delight: no Soviet man had set foot there, and it was a high-tech testing ground, something akin to Formula 1 in car manufacturing. The field was young, and Ivanov smiled, remembering, "Many techniques we discovered are now routine for ordinary citizens."

The investigation of case №18/12366693 was led by the prosecutor-criminalist of the General Prosecutor's Office, Vladimir Solovyev, now an investigator for significant cases of the Investigative Committee. He decided that the first thing to do was to take blood for comparative analysis from the Danish and British royal houses - the monarchs of Europe had blood ties with the Romanov family. For example, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, was a great-great-grandson of Nicholas I and a relative of Alexandra Feodorovna Romanova, wife of Nicholas II. When decoding the DNA of Nicholas II (skeleton №4), a rare mutation, heteroplasmy, was found, raising doubts about whether it was him. It became necessary to find the closest relative, and it all ended with the exhumation of the tsar's brother, Grand Duke George Alexandrovich. Ivanov conducted examinations in all possible directions - he studied the preserved hair of three-year-old Nicholas II, then went to Japan to retrieve a national relic from a museum.

In 1891, Tsarevich Nicholas Romanov traveled to the East and visited Japan in April. On April 29, a police fanatic, Tsuda Sanzo, who saw in Romanov a foreign spy, attacked the tsarevich's entourage in the city of Otsu. Sanzo struck Nicholas' head with a saber twice and was restrained. The injured royal head was treated on the spot - Nicholas smoked on the porch of a haberdashery while his head was being bandaged. The handkerchief used to stem the bleeding became a local relic and, along with the saber, a sailor's striped vest, and the porch couch, was placed in a local museum. When it became known that the handkerchief with Nicholas II's blood sample was still preserved in Japan, the state commission, created to oversee the investigation, decided that this handkerchief had to be obtained. The Japanese flatly refused to meet, and then a member of the commission, the mayor of St. Petersburg Anatoly Sobchak - under whom President of Russia Vladimir Putin began his career - told Ivanov to turn to Mstislav Rostropovich, who had good relations with the Japanese emperor. Ivanov met Rostropovich in London, and he managed to arrange everything somehow.

Rostropovich organized Ivanov's visa and flight with Aeroflot as a VIP. In Japan, Ivanov was housed in the Russian embassy in Osaka, and throughout the trip, the Japanese tormented Ivanov with protocol events before letting him access the handkerchief. And all he could get was a tiny thread. In the Otsu museum, two employees in white gloves solemnly took out the handkerchief in front of cameras, measured a half-millimeter strip with an iron disinfected ruler, and gave Ivanov a scalpel. He cut the strip in a grand act.

"But there was little blood on the edge. I told them: give me from the middle, I'll cut out a hole. They didn't allow it," Ivanov laughs.

The trip was pointless - over 100 years, the handkerchief had collected DNA from too many people.

The examination of the Romanov case ended in 1996, and by 1998, everything was officially concluded. Ivanov unequivocally confirmed: it was them. However, the aftertaste was unpleasant. Ivanov had significant complaints against investigator Vladimir Solovyev, calling him "a shortsighted, insane investigator" who received the case only because he once attended a history club. Solovyev, according to Ivanov, turned the investigation into an unprecedented opportunistic spectacle, constantly growing with new unnecessary research and swelling case volumes. "I expressed my opinion honestly and directly. He irritated me, I irritated him," says Ivanov. Solovyev, for his part, speaks of him with respect:

"I have a very high opinion of his work. He is our pioneer of human DNA identification, and it's always hard for the first one. His work was subjected to revision when new technologies appeared, and it turned out that he had done everything at the highest level."

Nonetheless, Ivanov did not participate in the second phase of the Romanov saga, which began in 2007 with the discovery of the remains of Nicholas II's children, Alexei and Maria. Solovyev created three genetic commissions, but Ivanov was reluctant from the start - the sudden discovery of the remains seemed dubious to him. Three commissions recognized the remains, but they have not been buried yet - the Russian Orthodox Church does not recognize them, so the bodies are still kept in the state archive.

Ivanov had other concerns: before his eyes, the method he created became a full-fledged part of the judicial system, and Ivanov only began to suspect what this entails.

V. The system protects itself

The possibility of error is inherently considered in the DNA fingerprinting method. Conclusions about the similarity of genetic codes never equate to 100% - the result always is 99.99%, and the whole question is how many digits after the decimal: the more, the more complex the research and the higher the probability. A probability of 99.99% means that in a group of 10,000 people, there will be only one with similar DNA, but in a group of a million, there could be 100 people with identical DNA. Mistakes can and do constantly occur at any stage - from collecting samples to compiling the expert's conclusion. The DNA fingerprinting technique is so ultra-sensitive that the criminal's DNA can get lost among foreign molecules, and a person who simply happened to be at the crime scene or even sneezed nearby might become a suspect. There have been utterly absurd stories worldwide - in 2005, in the USA, a man was accused of rape, but it later turned out that the actual criminal was the suspect's bone marrow donor. For such cases, there are programs for reviewing old criminal cases using even newer technologies. In 2007, the British Ministry of the Interior was forced to review thousands of criminal cases from 2000-2005 because DNA examinations could have been errors. In Australia in 2008, 7,000 cases were reviewed - due to mixed-up samples, an innocent man was jailed for murder, meaning there could have been errors in other examinations too. Ivanov mentions that there are scientific studies on the possibility of falsifying a specific person's DNA, and it cannot be excluded that in the future, there will be criminal trials where it will have to be proven that the suspect was in another part of the world at the time of the crime.

But in Russian reality, these problems are still far away - not only is there no mechanism for reviewing cases, but according to Ivanov's stories, there's no need to worry about fake DNA: if necessary, the evidence required by the investigation will appear in any case, without modern scientific discoveries.

"Over twenty years, I've gotten the impression that the law enforcement system was never particularly well-off. There are periodic exacerbations, and well-being has not yet been achieved - there's no objectivity. Some cases cannot withstand any criticism regarding the evidential base."

For a "serious" case - murder, violence, rape, or pedophilia - to go to court, it must have evidence, for example, a forensic examination. However, the law does not specify which kind, so investigators often conduct a biological blood examination - an ancient serology procedure not used in global practice since the invention of DNA fingerprinting. The essence of serology is simple - the examination determines the blood group.

"Let's say I have reliably established that you have the first blood group, and I have reliably established that the blood on the physical evidence is of the first group. How true will my conclusion be that it's your blood? Okay, off my head, every third person will have the same blood group. There's a thirty percent chance that it's your blood. Good evidence?" Ivanov smiles wryly. "With matching blood groups, you can only not exclude the origin of this blood from the person involved, but it cannot be affirmed. However, experts usually do not write the second part of the conclusion, and investigators interpret everything as they wish.

The case of the minor official Vladimir Makarov is just the most illustrative and well-known Ivanov assures. His colleagues had instances where, for similar cases, they told the court that the examination did not support the investigation's hypothesis, to which the court said: no problem, we have plenty of other evidence; we can do without the examination. "It's unclear where the initiative comes from - it varies in every case. Sometimes, the investigation pushes such decisions to get a reward for solving a high-profile case and exposing hazardous criminals. Sometimes, even the courts are not against conducting such a high-profile case, and then, as in Makarov's case, the court unites with the investigation, and everything the investigator says satisfies them. The overseeing prosecutor." According to Ivanov, there are registries of independent experts who are "on the feed" of the investigation: "And they get paid as external employees of the prosecutor's office or somewhere. You understand, right?" Ivanov smiles wryly again. "What will their conclusions be? And the money by state rates is small, but how does the institution look?"

Ivanov said the situation worsened because the Investigative Committee started conducting examinations. Initially, the forensic medical service was subordinated to the Ministry of Health because it was believed that this would ensure the independence of the examination. Suppose the investigator needs answers to questions in which he lacks knowledge. In that case, he turns to specialists who are not involved in the investigation and are independent of the investigator. "The Investigative Committee has an expert division but no official status. Imagine the investigation is concentrated here, and the investigator appoints an expert in his division. And if they allow themselves to exert pressure even in external systems, it's the end of everything."

Forensic medical experts complain on specialized forums that the country lacks molecular-genetic laboratories, the equipment is too expensive, and the investigation reluctantly appoints genetic examinations. Finally, there's always room for plain error. Pavel Ivanov recounts that in 2004, after a terrorist attack on the Paveletskaya - Avtozavodskaya stretch, due to incorrect investigative actions, a person who was on an extended business trip out of Moscow at that moment was declared dead. The press later circulated a photo of the man beside his grave. In Ivanov's practice, there were cases when the investigative team members incorrectly collected physical evidence and found genetic traces of an investigator who sneezed or worked without gloves on the weapon.

"Of course, I realized that there's another side to the coin, that something could be falsified," Ivanov lowers his voice and speaks very calmly. "But you know how? Abstractly. When you start to encounter it at some point, you begin to understand that this is not an isolated case, not a random seed of evil flew in, but it turns out, God forbid, that there is already some system. And then you start to weigh involuntarily - is there more good than evil? Or is there more evil than good?" Ivanov pauses for a moment. "So far, I still think there's more good than evil. But every such process, like Makarov's case... The system protects itself. Well, do we not know how many ordered examinations are done? Well, we know. A lot. A lot. In all areas, not only in forensic medicine. There's also telephone law and the subordination of lower levels, completely dependent on their superiors. And under a lying stone, water will not flow."

Geneticist Pavel Ivanov still doesn't fully understand what to do next. He wonders - perhaps, it's possible to quit his job, stir up public discussion, arrange debates, and what then, he asks himself in surprise, become a Sakharov condemning his creation? Maybe Ivanov continues to ponder and honestly do his job and help those in trouble - so that people know where to turn if something happens. What else? Go into private practice and consult. What more? Perhaps create a professional association, but then it would be necessary to endow powers like a bar association to revoke licenses. "But then you'll have to fight against certification commissions, which will protect their bread. But this is such a scary thing for me; I'm not a man of political science; I know in advance that I'm not cut out for this." But all this, Ivanov continues to muse aloud, are not apparent paths because the "degree of victory of this path" is not at all noticeable. "Maybe it's all in vain. And everything will bloom in full bloom, and you'll be watering the beds somewhere, in the best-case scenario. And they'll say: well, the man lost his mind, wanted more fame."

***

Outside Pavel Ivanov's office window, the wind moans, and trees beat against the glass. It has long been dark, and besides the steadily glowing computer monitor in the office, no other light is on. Ivanov leans back in his chair again and tells a humorless joke he remembers every time he thinks about what's happening. In the joke, Gnat steps out of his hut in the morning, looks at the sun, stretches, and says, "I've decided to do good. I'll go around the world and do good." He looks around, and there's a sea of dung. And the dung says to Gnat, "Gnat, I'll let you do good." Gnat looked and said, "Then I'll consume you." "And he consumed all the dung," Ivanov says joylessly. "And went to do good deeds. And only in this way does good always conquer evil."

The professor is on the warpath. He says it's not yet a rebellion because he is, at least for now, not a rebel. He does what's within his capabilities - works, openly talks about the problem, discusses it with colleagues, and at congresses of forensic medical experts. What to do next, he also doesn't yet know. The professor is on the warpath, but it's the kind of war in which you can't return a victor. Either perish or dig in the jungles and selflessly eliminate enemies individually and then still perish.