Communicating forensic genetics: 'enthusiastic' publics and the management of expectations

[Excerpt] ‘One of the most important problems in forensic medicine’, write foren- sic geneticists Angel Carracedo and Lourdes Prieto, ‘is the so-called “CSI effect”’ (Carracedo & Prieto 2018: 4). Their description of the threat posed by TV shows such as Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) to their dis- cipline runs as follows: ‘[m]ost TV series present forensic evidence as infallible – one hundred percent reliable, with no margin for doubt – when reality is very different: the scientific validity of forensic tests is variable’ (ibid.) [...].This work received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 648608), within the project ‘EXCHANGE – Forensic geneticists and the transnational exchange of DNA data in the EU: Engaging science with social control, citizenship and democracy’, led by Helena Machado and currently hosted at the Communication and Society Research Centre (CECS), Institute for Social Sciences of the University of Minho, Portugal