Dr. Passalacqua: A lot of times we're getting remains that might have soft tissues on them, right? They're going to be biohazardous. And so some of the first things that we're going to have to do is clean whatever might be still stuck to those bones off so that we can see the bony surfaces and we can take our measurements. And so we'll simmer things in water in like a crock-pot, for example, just to get everything soft and get everything to come off so that we have then clean bones that we can then work with.

Narrator: College of Arts and Sciences with your host, David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff. With departments as wide-ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials, and mathematics and languages, among many others, the College always has something exciting happening. Join us to find out what's new now.

David Staley: Nick Pasalaqua is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. He is a forensic anthropologist and director of the Forensic Anthropology Laboratory. He has numerous research interests, most of which focus on the nature and practice of forensic anthropology as a discipline. Dr. Pasalaqua, welcome to Voices.

Dr. Passalacqua: Thanks so much for having me.

David Staley: Well, and I want to start maybe with a definition of forensic anthropology. Now, I've I've watched Bones. I'm actually a big fan of Bones.

Dr. Passalacqua: Cool.

David Staley: What do we need to know about forensic anthropology that maybe I'm not seeing on a show like Bones?

Dr. Passalacqua: Okay, sure. So I'll start super basic. So anthropology is just the study of humanity. So there's lots of types of anthropologists that study lots of different things that humans do or human evolution and human ancestors, primates, that type of thing. As a forensic anthropologist, I apply anthropological methods and theory to medical legal matters. And so essentially, we can think about forensic anthropology as forensic anthropology as a discipline wouldn't exist if there wasn't a need for law enforcement, coroners, medical examiners to ask questions of anthropologists to help resolve their casework. So most of what forensic anthropologists do is assist with search and recovery efforts in the field for human remains and evidence, or analyzing human remains in the laboratory to figure out who that person was and how that person died.

David Staley: Before there were forensic anthropologists, was there anybody doing that kind of work and we just called them something else, or?

Dr. Passalacqua: Yeah, so forensic anthropology really started in like the early 1900s, and before that, you would have medical doctors, anatomists, and biological anthropologists that would sometimes get called in when somebody found a bone and wanted to know, "Is this a human bone? And if it is a human bone, who might it be from?" But it was very disjointed, very disorganized, and really starting in like the '20s, the '30s, the '40s, forensic anthropology really started to coalesce into a discipline. And then it wasn't until the 1970s when it became like an official thing where there's the American Board of Forensic Anthropology started, there's an anthropology section that's created within the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, which is the big national organization for forensic scientists. So that's really when forensic anthropology started to get rolling.

David Staley: Tell us about some of the methods that you employ as a forensic anthropologist.

Dr. Passalacqua: Yeah, so when we think about fieldwork, we're really applying archaeological methods, but in a forensic sense. So you think about what archaeologists do is they go outside to places and they look for things in a systematic manner so that when they search an area, if there's something there to find, they're likely to find it. And if there's nothing there to find, they can be confident we searched this in a way that we're not going to find anything. So we use those similar methods in forensic anthropology. We're just looking for more recent things.

Similarly, you think about archaeologists like excavating at sites and stuff. We do the same thing. We excavate, too, but we do it in a forensic context. So we're excavating recent graves. When we think about the laboratory, we're measuring bones, we're looking at the sizes and shapes of bones, and we're comparing those to databases of people that have known information and also that information on their skeleton so that we can look at these databases and say, "Okay, based on these measurements of our unknown individual, how does this compare to these known individuals?" and then, "What does that tell us about whatever parameter we might be looking at?"

So as forensic anthropologists, when we have a skeleton and we're not sure who it might be, we estimate what we call the biological profile. And so this is the biological sex, the age at death, the stature, and then the population affinity or kind of the ancestry of where that person might have come from. And we're going to give that information to investigators so that they can either create a list of missing people that might fit that demographic, or they may have a list already and they're going to use those parameters to shorten that list down to a more manageable size to try to figure out who our unknown individual is compared to missing persons reports.

David Staley: Age at death—how do you determine something like that just from bones?

Dr. Passalacqua: Yeah, so it kind of depends on how old the person was. So if a person is in their adolescence, their childhood, right, they're growing and developing. And so the skeleton is growing and developing along with all the other tissues in the body. And so we can look at the stages of growth and development. So you think about growth plates you've probably heard of before, right? So all of our bones have different growth plates and those fuse at specific times in males or females. And so depending on the sex, we can get a good estimate of how old somebody might be if they're in this kind of developmental period.

Once you hit adulthood and those growth and development processes have ceased, our skeleton, like the rest of our tissues, also ages and degrades. And so we're looking at certain areas of the skeleton to see what types of degenerative changes might be occurring and how extent those might be, and we can get an estimate of how old somebody was based on these characteristics of the bones.

David Staley: So you just said estimate. So my next question was, how precise can you be about the age of a victim?

Dr. Passalacqua: It's really variable, in part because in forensic anthropology, we don't always get complete skeletons. And so depending on the bones you have, you may be more or less limited in the methods that we can apply. But assuming we have a full skeleton, for subadults, we can usually get a pretty precise estimate, maybe plus or minus four years depending on how old they are. You think about children, right? The older they get, the broader the age estimate might be. Same thing for adults, too. So you think about somebody in their 20s, we're able to usually estimate them with a narrower interval. Once you're in your 30s, 40s, 50s plus, we're probably talking 20-year estimates. This person's between 30 and 50, 30 to 60 maybe, depending on what you've got. So it can be quite narrow depending on the age and then the elements available to us.

David Staley: So I've already made mention of Bones and I already sort of said I, I like watching Bones, and for people who don't know what I mean when I say Bones, it was the Fox television program that ran uh 2005 to 2017, I believe, ran for 12 seasons. But it was about a forensic anthropologist.

Dr. Passalacqua: Mhm.

David Staley: So how accurate was the portrayal of the work of a forensic anthropologist on that show, Bones?

Dr. Passalacqua: When I think of Bones, I lump Bones in my head with all those other types of crime shows, which are really just meant to be like very broad, fun interpretations of the different types of sciences, whether it's DNA or fingerprinting or whatever else. Bones, I think, is a fine representation at like the broadest level that a forensic anthropologist looks at skeletons and can find stuff out. I think then, of course, you televise it or make it like more enjoyable and entertaining. And in order to do that, you add a lot of layers of not true science or, "Yeah, maybe that could theoretically be possible, but you're pretending that it's very easy to do and you're doing it right away." There's a lot of skipping the hard, sciencey, forensics-y parts of it and just getting into, "I see this, so this means that," and they're losing a lot of the actual science behind a lot of what forensic anthropologists do.

David Staley: The other thing I remember about Bones was the technology. There was gadgets and things.

Dr. Passalacqua: Yeah.

David Staley: And I enjoyed watching the show largely because I could sort of say, "Well, I'm sure this is all fictional, but that's okay, it's just fictional."

Dr. Passalacqua:Sure.

David Staley: So surely there must be technology that you use. How is the depiction of technology, say, on Bones, how does that compare to the work you actually do in the field?

Dr. Passalacqua: Yeah, so Bones is actually pretty sci-fi compared to the actual practice of forensic anthropology.

David Staley: That's what I was afraid you were going to say.

Dr. Passalacqua: So forensic anthropology is actually, like, I think we're pretty basic in our technology because a lot of what we're doing is just relatively simple stuff, right? We're taking measurements, we're looking at things, and we're scoring them on grades, small to really big, ones to fives, something like that. There's more complex technology that we might use, things like mass specs, there's chemistry type stuff, but a lot of times when you're doing that, you're often working with a chemist, right? We're combining our expertises together.

David Staley: And remind us what a mass spec is.

Dr. Passalacqua: A mass spec is essentially a complicated piece of equipment that is going to look at the elemental composition of something. It could be bone. It could be whatever else.

In our lab here, we basically have measuring devices, we have crock-pots and a large kettle to simmer and clean things if we need to do that. We would love to have a 3D scanner or an X-ray machine, but it's a new lab and we're still getting things set up. But a lot of what they have in that show are weird holographic reconstruction things. I don't think could ever really exist, to be honest.

David Staley: Tell us a little bit more about the Forensic Anthropology Lab. What what would we see? Maybe a mass spec, but what would we see in the lab?

Dr. Passalacqua: Yes, so the lab is it's very similar to what you might see in a morgue or some type of dissecting room where, when we think about what we're doing, a lot of times we're getting remains that might have soft tissues on them, right? They're going to be biohazardous. And so some of the first things that we're going to have to do is clean whatever might be still stuck to those bones off so that we can see the bony surfaces and we can take our measurements. And so we'll simmer things in water in a crock-pot, for example, just to get everything soft and get everything to come off so that we have then clean bones that we can then work with. So it's going to have an autopsy dissecting table, sinks, we've got refrigerators, freezers.

David Staley: Graduate students, postdocs, I assume. Undergraduates in your lab?

Dr. Passalacqua: So we technically have two labs. So we have our wet lab, which is biohazardous, which to work in there you have to take a bunch of biohazard safety trainings and do all of that. And then we have our dry lab, which is a non-biohazardous lab. So right now we definitely have undergraduates working in our dry, non-biohazardous lab. The wet lab, the biohazard lab, is essentially brand new. It just came online in December. And so right now we're really doing a lot of working out steps and processes for stuff. We have to write standard operating procedures for how you do stuff. And then once those are really buttoned down, then we're hoping to get undergraduates in that lab, too. But we're just still kind of getting things spun up.

David Staley: So where are you getting these bones and remains? Where are they coming from?

Dr. Passalacqua: Yeah, so I mean, it really can vary. And so we also have non-human animals that we'll clean as reference specimens, right? Because we want to teach people not just what a human bone looks like, but, "This is what a deer's bone looks like, so you might see this and you can tell that it's not a human bone for these reasons." And so the non-human bone stuff, we'll bring in, right? You find non-human bones all the time on a go for on a going for a walk in the woods or whatever.

And then the human bones are typically going to come to us from coroner offices or medical examiner offices in the state as cases that we would consult on. And then the cases that we consult on, we really want to restrict any access to, right? Because that's like a separate thing than teaching specimens. So we're going to treat those a little bit differently and have a little bit more restricted access for when we're working on a case.

David Staley: A lot of your research involves studying or thinking about ethics and professionalism. This is really a central focus of your work, not just the science.

Dr. Passalacqua: Yeah.

David Staley: Why does a field like forensic anthropology need its own ethical framework?

Dr. Passalacqua: Yeah, so I would argue that essentially every field kind of needs its own ethical framework, really. And when I think about ethics, I really just think about some type of guidance for what is good to do and maybe what you shouldn't be doing. There's a quote, I can't remember the quote exactly, but it's by a medical ethicist, Applebaum, I think, and they essentially said, "Without ethics, there's no guideline for what is okay to do and what is not okay to do." And so what I think makes ethics important is we are often in our professional lives and even in our non-professional lives confronted with tough decisions that we have to make, and sometimes those decisions might not have clear answers, right or wrong. And so what ethics helps us do is it helps us make a decision and justify the reason that we made that decision.

And so I think ethics, when you're working with human remains as well as the surviving next of kin or families or communities associated with these, it's a pretty delicate subject. And we really want to make sure that we're doing right by everybody when we're working on a case, which is why I think ethics is particularly important because we're not just dealing with some random skeleton. We're dealing with the skeleton of a person who has family, communities that might be looking for them. And we want to make sure that we analyze them in a way that is scientifically sound and is also respectful and gets them identified as fast and rigorously as possible and gets them returned to whatever community might be looking for them.

David Staley: So you've literally written the textbook on this: Ethics and Professionalism in Forensic Anthropology. What are you doing in this book? Are you listing a series of guidelines, "Here's your ethics"?

Dr. Passalacqua: Yeah, so I do have some co-authors on the book. I'll shout them out, too. Marin Pilloud and Derek Congram, great forensic anthropologists. And the book does a lot of different things. So one of the things it does is it gives a quick introduction to just what is ethics, why should we care about ethics. It covers the current state of ethics in forensic anthropology as well as biological anthropology, and then it talks about some niche cases like how do we think about bones when they are on display in museums and why might that be good or why might that be bad. And then in the end, it kind of ends with a bunch of scenarios where, what if this happened, think about these things, think about the ethical codes we've already talked about, how might you proceed, why might you make these decisions or not make those other decisions—case studies to get people thinking in a more engaged, practical way.

David Staley: What's the thorniest dilemma you present in the book, or what do you see as maybe the thorniest dilemma that forensic anthropologists face?

Dr. Passalacqua: Hm. What a great question that I don't think I have a great answer to. There are lots of weird dilemmas. You might be familiar with like IRB, Institutional Review Boards, right? So Institutional Review Boards are there theoretically to help protect research subjects and researchers, right, and make sure that everything happens in a fair way and nobody's taking advantage of, nobody's exploited, right? But IRB specifically only applies to living people, right? So if you're working on a skeleton, IRB doesn't apply to you.

David Staley: Oh.

Dr. Passalacqua: Right. And so you get into weird situations where there's really no oversight over working with the dead, but there should be, right? And the way that we treat the dead and things that might happen to the dead have implications for the living. So it's this weird loophole where people that work with the dead have no ethical oversight over their conduct, over their research, over their practice. And so one of the things that we discuss in the book is what is the history of human rights and IRB and all of that, and then what does that mean for us that are working with people that fall outside of IRB, and how do we move forward with our practice in a way that makes sure that everybody is still treated fairly and kept safe from harm on both sides of researchers and practitioners.

David Staley: Why the focus on ethics? Why have you made that so central to your research?

Dr. Passalacqua: It was not intentional. Many years ago, I was working for the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, which is a DoD agency that searches for service members that were lost in past conflicts. And my office mate was Marin Pilloud, and then down the hall was also Derek Congram, so like there how we all first met each other over 10 years ago now. And Marin and I were just kind of getting to know each other, we're office mates, we're talking about research, we're talking about publications, we're going to conferences and we're talking about what we saw. And we both hit on this similar vein of how sometimes people that are working with the dead, we felt weren't being as respectful as they should be.

So, for example, there was a conference presentation, not by an anthropologist, and they were talking about a case study that they had worked on, and the case study was titled something like, "Suicide by table saw: a slice of interpretation." And I just thought, this is a real person who was a victim of suicide, and you're making a joke at their expense, I guess to get attention for your presentation, and I just felt it was in really poor taste. I felt like, what if a family member saw this? That's horrible. And so there were other circumstances that were similar. So Dr. Pilloud and I, Marin and I, were talking about this and how we both thought it was really unprofessional, and we started thinking about, well, we're saying that, but no one else seems to think that, right? This is presented at a national conference.

David Staley: Not even a professional organization had guidelines and standards?

Dr. Passalacqua: Not to govern that type of thing, yeah. And so that really is where this eventually spun out of. So we've published a little letter to the editor after that just talking about these things, and then it really went from there where we just more broadly started talking about ethics in other different ways. There were other ethical things that popped up that we were like, "Oh, this is usually this is something that bad has happened, but how interesting is it that this bad thing is showing us something we never even really thought much about before as a discipline," and how can we change our discipline to make sure this kind of thing doesn't happen again in the future, trying to protect again everyone from harm if you can do it, right? And so I think, from my training, right? Because I have a bachelor's degree from Michigan State, I've got a master's degree from Mercyhurst University, and then I have a PhD from Michigan State, all specializing in anthropology or forensic anthropology. And at none of those schools—we might have had a lecture or two about ethics, but we never had classes about ethics, right? It's just not something that we discuss a lot within our discipline. And so this is really just like me and Marin, and now other people, too, right, thinking about our discipline just in different ways and taking a step back and asking questions like, "Why do we do things this way? Why don't we talk about this? Have we just never thought about it before? Well, what does it mean that we haven't thought about it, and how can we maybe talk about things and get the discussion going in a way that's productive and might benefit everybody in the field?"

David Staley: I'd like to talk about the forensic anthropology program, which only started just a few years ago. You started with five students and now you have 100.

Dr. Passalacqua: Yeah.

David Staley: What accounts for so many students being apparently suddenly drawn to this field?

Dr. Passalacqua: Yeah, well, I think to be fair, I think part of it is just there's not a lot of forensic anthropology programs at the undergraduate or the graduate level, and—

David Staley: The only one?

Dr. Passalacqua: We're not the only one, but there aren't many. We're the only major in forensic anthropology, actually. So there are some other programs that focus on undergraduate education in forensic anthropology, but usually it's a major in anthropology and then you have a concentration. So before coming to OSU, I was the director of forensic anthropology at Western Carolina University, which is an undergraduate-only program. And there, it's a concentration within the major, right? There's also the University of Tennessee Knoxville has a concentration, the Washburn University in Kansas, right? There's very few that specialize in forensic anthropology, and when they do, it's typically a concentration. So we're the first major, and we're really filling a gap in the Midwest where there's not a lot of available forensic anthropology programs. There's Michigan State University in East Lansing, there's Northern Michigan way up in the Upper Peninsula, and then that's it. So I think really part of what it represents is there were students here that were interested in forensic anthropology, but it just wasn't an option for those students. So maybe they did something else, right? Maybe they majored in just anthropology, maybe they're majoring in one of the forensic biology, forensic chemistry things, criminal justice. So I think part of it is we're filling a gap where there wasn't one before. And then the other part is just like the forensic sciences are interesting, and forensic anthropology—I'm biased because I'm a forensic anthropologist—I think is particularly interesting because it's much more hands-on than something like chemistry, where like a forensic chemist is great, but you're it's a lot of like small samples of stuff that you're putting into machines and you're reading outputs, whereas us, we're physically like holding human remains and measuring them and putting those measurements into databases. So it's a lot more like tactilely like feel and do and engage with.

David Staley: And your students get hands-on experience, right? With real skeletal remains. That that—is that typical?

Dr. Passalacqua: It's typical.  It depends on the school and depends on what type of stuff they have.  So Western Carolina University for example, they have a human decomposition facility there, where people can donate their bodies, they decompose in an outside laboratory and then they are brought inside once the soft tissue decomposition is ended.  The skeletal remains are cleaned and they are kept in a skeletal collection there for teaching and for research. So for example, that school has a lot of human remains that they use for teaching. But there are other schools that don't have those types of resources so they often will use plastic casts or that type of thing so we're very lucky here that while we do have plastic casts, we really try to emphasize using real human bones as much as possible because plastic casts are great but they're not the real thing and they're quite different from the real thing. So we're lucky that we have a donated skeletal collection in here and we also have a fragmentary human skeletal collection that's on loan to one of our bioarchaeologists from a community in Transylvania so it's like a Hungarian descendant community.  They're working to excavate a cemetery and then the Hungarian descendant community there has said "Hey these little pieces of broken bone you're welcome to take and teach with back to the United States and they 're really excited about it and it's really great.  So we've actually amazing teaching collections.

David  Staley: I'd like to hear more about the FAST program Forensic Anthropology Services and Training. And this is distinct like I guess from the Forensic Anthropology Labs. That correct?

Dr. Passalacqua: You could think about it in a few different ways.  So we have the undergraduate major, we've got our graduate program, all right, so we've got  the educational part of our Forensic Anthropology Program. We've got our laboratories which are physical spaces that our students can work in, and then FAST really represents our external arm where that let's us interact with law enforcement, coroner's offices, medical examiners' offices, in order to actually practice Forensic Anthropology as uh a consultant, right. So essentially I, here at OSU, my main position is a faculty member and then as a faculty member of course we do research and teaching and so part of my service component is I consult for local offices and then we charge them some fees for our services and then those fees go into a research account that we use to support students and faculty for research and continuing education.  

David  Staley: So you're the - as I understand - you're the only certified Forensic anthropologist with an active Forensic lab in the entire state.  Is that right?

Dr. Passalacqua: Uhhuh

David  Staley: So what kinds of cases typically land on your desk or can't you say?

Dr. Passalacqua: I won't get too into the weeds on any of them, but Forensic Anthropologists do a lot of different things, and one of the things that we do a lot is what we would call the determination of medical, legal significance. Or essentially somebody finds something and they're not sure if it's a human bone or not, so they're not sure if it has significance to the medical legal death investigation system. So it's really common that investigators, law enforcement are called out to a scene because somebody found what they think might be a human bone. And so a lot of times I'll just get texted a picture and say "hey it's so and so from this agency, somebody found this, does this look like a human bone or not. Usually it's not and then we can often just do it through texts back and forth.  Sometimes I would actually need to see it depending on what it is. And then if it is human bone obviously then it's going to go to a coroner or medical examiner's office and then from there if they need help with it they are welcome to ask and we can try to figure out - we can do that biological profile and estimate age, sex, stature and ancestry.  Or we can try to look at the bone to see what type of damage might be on that bone to find out if that has any implications for how that person died or if those - that damage happened after that person died.  

David  Staley: Hmm.  You've described Forensic Anthropology as having a humanitarian mission.

Dr. Passalacqua: Yeah. 

David  Staley: What does that mean?

Dr. Passalacqua: So when I think about forensic anthropology, right, our goal is to work with humans to return the dead to their living next of kin, families, communities, right.  And I think that that really is a broadly humanitarian mission.  We're working to try to help people through these difficult times, trying to get these unknown individuals identified and returned. We think about humanitarian work, it's to me anyway, similar but also a little different than human rights work.  So human rights work really means that there's some international, human rights law that might have been violated but there's lots of deaths that happen that have nothing to do with human rights law violations but they still need to be investigated and they still need to have these people's names returned to them and then be returned to their communities.  And so when we think about what forensic anthropologists do, I think it's broadly humanitarian in that we're servicing families, communities, to try to solve these problems that they are facing. 

David  Staley: Why ae you a forensic anthropologist?  What drew you to this field as opposed to some other field?  I don't know, like history or...

Dr. Passalacqua: Sure. 

David  Staley: Classical guitar.  Something like that.

Dr. Passalacqua: I don't have a great answer.  When I was little - Jurassic Park came out when I was 10 all right. I always loved dinosaurs.  I thought that they were so cool.  I thought fossils were so interesting.  And also I just always thought bones were neat.  You're walking around and you find a bone and "oh, what animal could this be from?" At some point growing up I moved past that and just lost any idea of what I wanted to do with my life. I went to Michigan State University for undergrad, really with no direction at all.  I had no idea what I was going to do.  I was just like this is what you do when you finish high school - 

David  Staley: right 

Dr. Passalacqua: you go to college.  I didn't know it at the time but Michigan State was, used to be, one of the big forensic anthropology schools in the United States. And so I took some general, all elective class that by chance was taught by a forensic anthropologist and he talked a little bit about forensic anthropology and I thought, oh this is really neat. He was a great professor, he's still up there, Dr. Todd Fenton.  And so I really loved that class, I ended up taking some more classes from him, I took some more anthropology classes, and eventually decided, what am I doing?  I should just change my major to anthropology.  And then eventually it was like, yeah, forensic anthropology is something I'm really interested in.  Some of the grad students there, like now Dr. Mary Megyesi, she was a TA for one of my classes, and has suggested "hey you might want to look at Mercyhurst for a master's degree, you might want to look at University of Indianapolis". So then I start thinking about grad schools and here we are. 

David  Staley: (laughing) For someone who's listening to this podcast right now who might be interested in this field, what's the honest reality of this career path?  What advice would you give someone?

Dr. Passalacqua: Yeah. So the honest reality is all of the forensic sciences are very competitive, cause there's not that many programs in the United States, and there's not that many positions for forensic scientists in the United States. So there's not that many undergraduate degrees and then graduate programs can often be competitive. But there are lots of jobs for people interested in this type of thing.  What I often say is if you're interested in forensic anthropology, try to go to a school that has a forensic anthropologist at it if you can.  Whether or not you can do that just do the best that you can, at least do the best that you can in school, right?  Your grades really matter, your letters of recommendation are really going to matter, so try to work with faculty, try to get any type of research projects, internships, volunteering, any of that stuff you can to get you more exposed to the field.  Forensic anthropology us difficult because it's working with cases, dealing with biohazardous laboratories and stuff so there's not a lot of internships available because it's really sensitive material. From the undergraduate career perspective, right, assuming you're not going to go to graduate school.  I really think things like autopsy technicians, death investigators, crime scene techs, law enforcement, maybe working with human remains detection dogs, these are all careers that always need people and are applying the skills that we learn in forensic anthropology classes, which ae really not just about the skeleton but also working with human remains, working in biohazardous laboratories, working with other people with other specialties coming together with a common goal from different angles.

David  Staley: What are you working on now? What's next for your research?

Dr. Passalacqua: Hmmm.  The project that we're working on right now, my graduate student and then some colleagues and I, are looking at some of these large language models, looking at Chat GPT and those things for how they interpret pictures of bones, this medical-legal significance thing.  Lots of people find stuff and it's become clear that there are lots of people that don't have a background in forensic anthropology that ae like "I don't know what this bone is.  I'll take a picture of it and I'll ask Claude or whatever to tell me what this bone is." And they will give you answers.

David  Staley: yeah not necessarily the correct answer

Dr. Passalacqua: So what we are really trying to figure out is like how often are these things correct, and like how are the prompts that we're using influencing their outputs.  Because, if a bone is human bone and one of these models tells somebody it's not then that bone is going to be discarded or destroyed and that has significant implications for the case.  And on the other hand if a bone is not a human bone, and one of these models tells you that it is, then that is going to invest a huge amount of investigative time towards something that does not need to be investigated. And so as these things become more commonly used, by a broader public, we really want to make sure that as much as we can, as the people that are the experts that do this type of thing, we can guide how should these models be used to answer these questions, if at all.  And if not, or if so, right, what are the processes that we should be telling people like this is a good way that you might want to ask this question.  Or, maybe don't ask it at all, just contact a forensic anthropologist, which is probably the best answer but we won't know until we do the research.

David  Staley: I was going to say, maybe the answer to my question is do you have any preliminary conclusions or preliminary ideas?

Dr. Passalacqua: Preliminary results are don't do it .It works really really poorly. But again, these are preliminary results.

David  Staley: Do you and your colleagues have any interest in developing your own technology; don't use Claude, use something else. 

Dr. Passalacqua: Anything is possible.  We'll see how this research develops and see what the potential utility might be based on maybe trends in answers that we are seeing them getting right or wrong or features these models might be picking up on: "Hey, I see this so it must be that" or like, who knows how these things are trying to do what they are doing and what type of reference data they even have.

David  Staley: Nick Passalacqua, thank you.

Dr. Passalacqua: Thank you, it's been a pleasure

Narrator: Voices of Excellence is produced and recorded at the Ohio State University, College of Arts and Sciences Marketing and Communications studio.  More information about the podcast and our guests can be found at go.osu.edu/voices. Voices of Excellence is produced by Doug Dangler.  I'm Jen Farmer.