CSI's Forensic Entomologist Talks Insects

On the original CSI, Gil Grissom's team members have always been both awed and repulsed by his fascination with his insects. This week, Grissom's real-life counterpart revealed a love of bugs is not something exclusively reserved for fictional characters.

"I’m pretty intimate with chigger mites," M. Lee Goff, the forensic entomologist who advises the CSI writers on all insect-related matters, told the official British CSI magazine when asked to name his favourite insect. "I have a history with them. They’re so disliked but are fascinating little creatures with 500 to 600 different species. On humans they cause red welts and bites that itch like hell, but oddly after 25 years of working with them I’ve never been bitten by one!"

As a forensic entomologist, Goff spends the bulk of his time trying to determine the time of death of deceased persons, based on insect activity inside their bodies. His services are always in demand, as he is one of only eight people in the US officially licensed for his profession. So it comes as no surprise he's got some interesting stories to tell. "[The writers have] used some of the cases I’ve worked on in my book A Fly for the Prosecution as plots. I mainly answer questions about whether a scenario could work -- or how the production team could make it work better. It's always along the lines of 'a body is found on a mountain, buried up to the neck. What would happen to the body in those conditions; what insects would be present?'"

While Goff has given a lot of advice to the CSI writers, he's also got something in return: increased attention for his job. "I used to get just 15 students and now there are 100 in forensics," he said. "It’s also attracting a good grade of 'strange' people that might not have thought about this line of work before. But the general public sometime anticipates a little too much from us now, especially for court testimony. We can't always be as precise as they'd like if the evidence doesn't prove it. Since the OJ Simpson case, the field of forensics has become much more main stream."

More from Goff can be found in issues five and nine of the British Official DVD Collection magazine, which is published bi-weekly in the United Kingdom and Ireland, and also each issue includes a DVD carrying two episodes from CSI's first season. A few more excerpts from the Goff interview, in which he discusses the precise techniques of entomology, can be found at the magazine's official web site.

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