“Your staff has to have pretty thick skin because if you’re training them you can’t hold back any punches,” he says.
They must be the most knowledgeable person in the room, answer what is asked and admit when they don’t know something.
“I think the hardest thing for scientists or technical people is to lose the jargon,” Perlin says. “How do you communicate as if you’re at a Thanksgiving meal and you’re talking to your Aunt Tilly?”
Memorable impact
Cybergenetics and its TrueAllele® technology have two types of impact, says Mark Perlin, chief scientific and executive officer.
The more common one — because of the nature of DNA — is when there’s a serial rapist or terrible murderer, and only advanced DNA and what the company is doing can help get justice.
“But the cases that we often remember longer, and we can be more touched by, are when you have somebody who is actually innocent,” Perlin says.
Some innocent people go to jail and the people who put them in jail can’t believe they’re not guilty, he says. They put all this work into prosecuting them, so they often have a tunnel vision.
When you can use technology to pull information out of the DNA, that a crime lab couldn’t, and prove to a prosecutor or a judge that this man’s innocent, his DNA isn’t there and they’re exonerated or released from prison, that’s an impact, Perlin says.
The most dramatic case like this was the exoneration of two Indiana men, who were convicted in a gang rape. There were misidentified through clothing that was stolen from their car. Perlin says the DNA that would have shown it could not have been them was under-interpreted or partially inconclusive, until the TrueAllele computer analysis.
“What the courts required from that evidence, the crime labs could not produce. And in that situation, we made a real difference,” he says.
Those two men are proceeding with a civil suit. One had been in jail for 24 years and the other was in jail for 16 years. Perlin recently met with them in Chicago and he saw firsthand the impact of the wrongful conviction. It affected their family and an entire community of people.
“It’s quite revealing. It’s not just one man who’s been in jail. No, it’s one man who hasn’t seen his children for 20 years,” he says.
Those are the kinds of cases, Perlin and his team at Cybergenetics are touched by the most.
“It doesn’t mean everybody in jail is innocent — far from it. It just means that there are some innocent people in jail whom DNA has not helped, but our technology can help them,” Perlin says.
