Chemist Raychelle Burks learns how to cope with death while working in a crime lab.
After a few years working in a crime lab, Raychelle Burks returned to academia, teaching, and forensic science research. An analytical chemist, Dr. Burks enjoys the challenge of developing detection methods for a wide-variety of analytes including regulated drugs and explosives. Her current research efforts are focused on the design, fabrication, and analysis of colorimetry sensors that are field portable. To maximize portability, Dr. Burks works on utilizing smart phones as scientific analytical devices. A chemistry enthusiast, Dr. Burks hopes to ignite her students' appreciation of chemistry through innovative projects, multi-media education tools, and probably far too many pop culture references. She help create and organize SciPop Talks! a popular talk series blending science and pop culture. Dr. Burks is a popular science communicator, appearing on the Science Channel's Outrageous Acts of Science, ACS Reactions videos, Royal Society of Chemistry podcasts, and at genre conventions such as DragonCon and GeekGirlCon.
This story originally aired July 21, 2017.
Story Transcript
You know, if you ask a scientist and you say, “What’s a question you get asked a lot?” and we get asked lots of questions, but we tend to get asked the same question a lot. And I've got a friend who’s an astronomer who gets asked all the time about black holes and whether they really suck you in like a vacuum. Yes, I am one of the people that ask them that.
Me, what do I get asked? Well, I get asked, “How do you kill people and get away with it?”
I’m not an assassin. I’m just a chemist with interesting life experiences. Maybe I should -- full disclosure here. One of the reasons why I get asked about killing people a lot is because, for the last five or six years, I've hosted forensic science panels at big genre cons like Dragoncon and GeekGirlCon and CONvergence. So think about it as how to get away with murder as a Q and A, not a television show.
And these genre cons, there are all kinds of people that come to these. Scientists and non-scientists, geeks, dweebs, dorks, nerds -- so my people -- and also cool kids and jocks. It’s a real mixed bag in the audience so it’s a great way to do science communication. We just get all kinds of questions when we do these panels.
These panels are so much fun to do, these murder panels, and that might seem really weird. Why would it be fun? But first I want to give you the same disclaimer that I always give the panels. I'll put on my serious face now.
Murder is serious and murder is wrong. If we are sarcastic or outlandish, it’s not because those things aren’t true, it’s because we’re trying to cope with really complicated things and really awful things, and we’re trying to talk about the science involved in that. It’s just a way to cope with difficult stuff. It’s gallows humor and it’s not meant to be disrespectful.
With that, I usually open up the panel for questions. We get all kinds of questions, deliciously evil questions because people have great imaginations. And a lot of people have given murder a lot of thought, so I'll be working for a very long time.
You can imagine that a panel with an anthropologist, a biologist, a chemist, a geologist, an engineer, an entomologist, we’d have all kinds of answers. You'd get a different answer for every question. Except for that one question, this one question where we all gave the same answer. Where would you kill someone?
Clearly, the answer is a national park. It’s isolated, it’s remote, there are scavenger predators. I don't think I need to go on.
And as a chemist, we’re quite famous in fiction for killing all kinds of people in interesting and exciting ways, so I fielded all kinds of questions.
But there was one question that I got at a panel that really threw me for a loop and it threw me back into time. Somebody right in the front said -- they started their question with, “So, my friend was murdered.”
You can imagine that the room’s mood completely changed. Up until then there was lots of gallows humor and inappropriate jokes and outlandish schemes. It changed in an instant with, “So, my friend was murdered.”
And I know that in the two seconds between the end of that person’s question and my answer -- I know it was only two seconds, but it felt much longer -- in that two seconds, I relived an entire day. In that two seconds, I was no longer in the panel room. I was in a basement morgue looking at a little girl. A little girl who looked so much like my niece. To this day, it still takes my breath away. A little girl whose short life had obviously been filled with so much pain, and I didn’t do a good job. I still don’t do a good job when I talk about it. What I mean by a good job is being this stoic professional who had a job to do.
At the time that this occurred, I was just a flunky intern trying to learn the ropes. One of the most important things that I was going to have to learn was to process life’s cruelty much faster so that I could do my job. You see, everyone of us, I think, in this room, if we were to die in mysterious circumstances, someone would cry for us and someone would grieve for us and someone would be so angry that this had happened to us. And those are the people that love us, right? Those are our loved ones. Those are our friends and our family.
But maybe you don’t know this. There's a second group of people, strangers to you, that will care for you too. But they will care for you in a different way. They will care for you by being thorough and task orientated. They will care for you by being accurate and precise. These are the forensic pathologists and the crime scene analysts and the toxicologists and the print examiners. They're people that maybe you don’t know in your everyday life, but they will demonstrate care by doing their job and doing it well, and giving some type of answer and maybe some type of closure to that other group of people that will care about you in the emotional way because they knew you and they loved you.
I had to get to the point -- I had to learn to be that stoic professional because I needed to be able to step up and do my job and do it quickly and efficiently with the skills and experience that I had. I wasn’t in that other group and I couldn’t act like I was because I had a job to do. I first learned that and how to do that by failing at it spectacularly in that basement morgue.
I did not hold it together. I cried. And I took involuntary steps back. That is not what you do in that type of job.
But I got better at it and I was able to, instead of stepping back, to step forward and to do my work and to demonstrate care.
I don't do that kind of work anymore. I came back to academia. But I brought with me some of the ability to be the stoic professional.
Back in that panel room, I switched into that mode and I answered that person’s question that had started with, “So, my friend was murdered,” and I answered it professionally and I hope with compassion. But there was no gallows humor. It wasn’t the place for it. What do you do after a question like that? Because the panel long as an hour long and we were about thirty minutes in.
Well, here’s what happened next. We went right back to being absurd about murder and making fun of Bones, a show we all can’t stand, and lamenting over why we don’t get sunglasses like CSI: Miami. That may seem like a wild shift, just this ability to go from jovial to this so-my-friend-was-murdered moment in a panel, but it didn’t feel that way. It didn’t feel jarring. It felt like life.
Life brings us moments that take our breath away. And sometimes we’ll cry. And sometimes we will scream. And sometimes we will laugh. Sometimes we do all three. It’s how we've learned to cope. It’s something that I’m still learning.
Thank you.