Challenges to Forensic Medicine in the Postmodern Era - the Impact of the New Technologies

Technology is in a quasi-permanent evolution in most professional areas, which has the potential to improve people’s lives. The new technologies are already part of our lives, being able to create facilities which we would not even imagine it could be possible relatively little time ago. Forensic medicine did not move backward from implementing the new technologies, being in this way an important support for justice as the assessment is more accurate and more valuable, the offenders are sentenced, the innocents are exonerated, and victims in mass disasters are quickly identified. In this paper the authors analyze the impact the new technologies have in different areas of forensic medicine, such as forensic toxicology- particularly using GC-Ion Trap MS and LC-MS technologies, forensic imaging applied to post-mortem examination- using virtopsy and forensic genetics- the use and permanent refinement of DNA technology. The authors highlight, on the one hand, the improvements the new technologies brought in justice and society, and on the other hand the challenges associated with their implementation.