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Crime-solving microscope
In Book of the Dead, best-selling author Patricia Cornwell’s crime-solving forensic pathologist, Kay Scarpetta, uses Y-12’s Large-Chamber Scanning Electron Microscope to find crucial information that helps solve the crime.
By Cindy Robinson — Best-selling author Patricia Cornwell begins chapter 19 of her newest novel, Book of the Dead, in a location unknown to most of the world. “Y‑12 National Security Complex. Scarpetta stops her rental car at a checkpoint in the midst of concrete blast barriers and fences topped with razor wire.”
Cornwell is known for being the first to introduce the newest and most powerful technical instruments and procedures — going all the way back to 1990, when she introduced readers to DNA. In Book of the Dead, her crime-solving forensic pathologist, Kay Scarpetta, uses Y‑12’s Large-Chamber Scanning Electron Microscope to find crucial information that helps solve the crime.
Y‑12’s LC-SEM is the largest chamber scanning electron microscope available to the public — large enough to accommodate an entire V6 engine block. Its many capabilities include a Fourier transform infrared spectrometer, a backscatter electron detector, an energy dispersive X-ray spectrometer, electron backscatter diffraction, a focused ion beam and variable pressure. Magnification goes to 200,000 power, with 10-nanometer resolution — which is 10,000 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair.
When Cornwell toured Y‑12 earlier in 2007, she was particularly fascinated with the LC-SEM. “For more than twenty years,” Cornwell said, “I’ve been researching scientific techniques and instruments here and abroad, and I’ve never seen anything as stunning as the LC-SEM at Y‑12.”
Since then, she has tapped the LC-SEM to analyze the crayon-like substance from an alleged Jack the Ripper letter. Years after publication of her nonfiction best seller Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper, Case Closed, she continues to research her belief that Jack the Ripper was Walter Sickert, an artist.
Cornwell said, “I am convinced if all of the Ripper documents could be examined with Y‑12’s LC-SEM, we would gain information that would be truly important — maybe even startling.”
This is not Cornwell’s first use of East Tennessee’s unique crime-solving capabilities. Her novel, The Body Farm, spotlighted the University of Tennessee’s Anthropological Research Facility, where bodies decompose under varying conditions to provide critical data for forensic studies.
Cornwell took some poetic license in Book of the Dead by changing the location of the LC-SEM. But her descriptions of the huge microscope — “dampening pillars the diameter of trees,” “the air dryer vents in a huge, heartfelt sigh that sounds like a whale” — are as awe-inspiring as the microscope itself.