Eli5: cops waiting for DNA results

791 views

I’m watching Dateline and this suspect left a police interview and committed another murder. The first cops couldn’t arrest him because their evidence was all circumstantial. While they are looking for him now, the voiceover says DNA results are still not back. At this point it’s been several weeks. So Eli5 – DNA results: wtf takes so long?

Is there only one machine in the world? Can’t they move murder cases to the front of the line? Does the DNA fairy only come once a month? Does DNA take 500 hours to marinate? Can the cops buy another DNA machine? Do we need a GoFundMe?

In: 6

9 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

DNA sequencing can be done very quickly now, but if you have TONS of samples to get through, it’s a lot more efficient to run them in batches as others have mentioned. This takes a little longer, but you can get through a lot more samples in a reasonable amount of time. They can probably rush the results if it’s super urgent for some reason, but generally a few days vs. a couple weeks doesn’t make a huge difference for drawn out murder cases.

You are viewing 1 out of 9 answers, click here to view all answers.