The body of the nineteenth century philosopher Jeremy Bentham is on display in a glass cage at University College, London. Bentham applied his utilitarian perspectives to the body by suggesting that corpses, including his own, would be of greater use to society stuffed and displayed as an “auto-icon” rather than simply buried away. Preserved, exhibited and studied, the corpse, he said, could serve “moral, political, honorific, dehonorific, money-saving, money getting, commemorative, genealogical, architectural, theatrical, and phrenological” ends.

There are a remarkable number of similarities between science and the law. Each discipline sets as a gold standard a search for precision. For example, scientists utilize the scientific method—a specific set of principles and procedures designed to aid them in a systematic pursuit of knowledge. Following the scientific method involves the recognition and formulation of a problem, the collection of data through observation and possibly experimentation, the formulation of a hypothesis and the testing and confirmation of the hypothesis formulated. The law, in turn, seeks its form of precision through the careful use of words, as in finely crafted statutes or regulations and contractual language that seek to eliminate the possibility of vagueness or confusion. Each discipline utilizes an approach or methodology that strives to minimize or eliminate the possibility of error and to arrive at a form of “truth” that it recognizes as being maximal within the confines of the rules it has established, be they rules of scientific method or legal rules of evidence.

After a decade of courtroom battles and heated academic debate, the United States has entered an age where the scientific validity of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) evidence is not subject to serious dispute. The problem with DNA evidence is no longer one of validity, but one of proficiency. Two confounding variables in the DNA testing process weaken and often destroy DNA's powerfulness and usefulness in the courtroom: crime labs and juries.

This Note proposes new and stringent standards for the admissibility of DNA evidence. The admissibility of forensic DNA evidence must be conditioned on its examination by a crime lab governed by uniform national standards. Such governing national standards must encompass every aspect of the forensic process, from chain of custody to DNA testing procedures, in order to ensure the reliability of DNA evidence. Implementing such a comprehensive national standard, however, only represents a first step toward solving the problem of DNA evidence in the courtroom. This step, however, fails to address the second problem facing the effective use of DNA in courtrooms: juries.

The Internet offers pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers a dynamic new medium for promoting their products—a medium that might actually be better suited for health care product promotion than print or television. On the Internet's World Wide Web (Web) pages, drug and device makers can produce interactive marketing and advertising material that more easily complies with current Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) disclosure requirements. Navigation buttons and hypertext links can facilitate compliance with such information disclosure requirements by allowing drug and device makers to “hide” the brief summaries or labels until interested viewers “click” on them.

Despite the appropriateness of the medium, however, a Web search today will turn up less drug and medical device promotion than one might expect. In fact, the Web, which represented $7 billion in commerce in 1997 and is expected to account for $20 billion in 1998, is strangely quiet on this front.