Brain Prints

SCIENCE

Although it has rarely if ever been done successfully, experts say it is possible for criminals to mutilate their fingerprints with acid or otherwise until recognition is dubious or impossible. Medical societies have been shown photographs of faces completely altered by plastic surgery. Year ago Dr. Carleton Simon, Manhattan criminologist, proposed an identification system based on the pattern of blood vessels in the eye, which is never the same in any two individuals (TIME, Dec. 16, 1935). A malefactor would not be able to beat this system, Dr. Simon pointed out, unless he blinded himself. Last week two Iowa State University psychologists suggested yet another system, not infallible but good in the majority of cases, which a criminal could not beat unless he decapitated himself.

Scientists have long known that there are electrical potentials in the brain, charted the brain waves as wavy lines with amplifiers and oscillographs. Iowa State's Professor Lee Edward Travis and Co-worker Abraham Gottlober heard a colleague from Harvard declare that every brain had its electric individuality. Investigating, they made several series of oscillograms of the brain waves of 44 healthy students. Since the waves change in character according to the physical well-being of the body and the activity of the mind, Travis & Gottlober tried to get records under uniform conditions by having the subjects lie down in a dark room, try to keep their minds blank. Then Travis & Gottlober and two other researchers tried to see if they could tell which of the oscillograms came from the same brains. In Science last week they reported that in a long series of tests, they made 352 correct identifications, 20 errors. This was accuracy of 94%, much higher than could be explained by chance. Moreover, they improved with practice until at the last of four trials all four researchers made 100% correct scores. Criteria they used for matching were the frequency, form and amplitude of the waves.

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