Eugene Russo | Jun 11, 2000 | 8 min read
Graphic: Cathleen Heard Law enforcement officials routinely use DNA fingerprinting as a tool to get the guilty punished. Defense lawyers often rely on the same tool to free the innocent. Though their labs may be less dramatic settings than criminal courtrooms, life science researchers also use DNA fingerprinting, but rather than capturing criminals, their goal is to keep tabs on a different sort of culprit: infectious disease. The technology has revolutionized the way diseases are tracked and th