DNA Forensic Lab Coming Soon
George Lovell
It shouldn’t take long before the country has a fully functional DNA laboratory. Well, that’s the impression that C.E.O. in the Ministry of National Security George Lovell gave the media on Tuesday. It has been more than five years since the ministry began making moves to locate funding in order to construct the facility which will now be realized in a very short time. Lovell says that the land upon where the facility will be built has been identified and the first tranche of funding has been secured via the Central American Bank for Economic Integration, CABEI loan agreement.
(Ret.) Col. George Lovell, C.E.O., Ministry of National Security
“The DNA lab is one of those things that we are certainly looking forward to happen in a very short time. These things take some time because a lab will not just, because we have the money tomorrow, show up. We have to ensure that we have proper drawings, there is old procurement procedure that we have to go through and then the construction itself will take some time but yes it is still there and we are still working on that. Just last week I have had the privilege of having a detailed discussion with the new executive director of the National Forensic Science Service and this came after we have had an assessment done by a team… It’s an assessment group that does assessments of the forensic laboratory because we were looking at seeing how we can have our laboratory facility to a certain level where we are accredited and to check to see how far we were from the possible accreditation that we are looking forward to. During that discussions, there were a number of good things that came out of it. The assessment team gave us a report where certainly I will have to have further discussions with the Ministry of Public Service and the Ministry of Finance because they are saying, just to give you a few things of what they mention, is that we need to look at our whole aspect of post-mortems that we do and the fact that the limited amount of pathologists that we have that conducts those post-mortems create some challenges that we might need to want to have not just Dr. Estrada and Dr. Ken and Dr. Blanco but try to have three or four more of these specialists employed in a very short time frame. We are looking at a quality assurance person to be there. We are looking at having a larger category of scenes of crime technicians.”
