{"id":680518,"date":"2010-03-02T20:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-03T01:00:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2026-10-04T11:07:40","modified_gmt":"2026-10-04T15:07:40","slug":"readers-pick-your-poison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/680518","title":{"rendered":"Readers, pick your poison"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Bottles containing poison could be found on household shelves a century ago.<\/DIV>
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If you think the investigators on “C.S.I,” “Law and Order” and other cop shows have it tough, imagine what it was like a century ago – when a confessed poisoner went free because no one could prove he did it. Forensic science, as it’s practiced today on television and in thousands of real-life crime labs, hadn’t yet been invented.<\/P>
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“It wasn’t just that they didn’t have the tests,” Pulitzer-winning science writer Deborah Blum told me today. “They didn’t have the apparatus to do the tests.”<\/P>
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Blum tells the tale behind the birth of forensic science in “The Poisoner’s Handbook,”<\/A> a saga that literally lets readers pick their poison.<\/P>…(read more<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Getty Images Bottles containing poison could be found on household shelves a century ago. If you think the investigators on “C.S.I,” “Law and Order” and other cop shows have it tough, imagine what it was like a century ago – when a confessed poisoner went free because no one could prove he did it. Forensic science, as it’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3300,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4821],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-680518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9NivD-2R26","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3300"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=680518"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680518\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":781922,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680518\/revisions\/781922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=680518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=680518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=680518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}