CSI and the purge-and-trap

Recently, an article at "The Economist" described what is called CSI effect: The fact that this TV Show is raising the expectations of Jury members about what forensics sciences can or can not do. Maybe, the bad side of science popularization. This is simple because in TV Show everything is wonderful, and sometimes almost magical.

No long sample preparations, analysis always works and answers are just some clicks away.

We all know that in real world things are little different.

The video below is good exemple of what chromatography can do in forensics, except for the almost instantaneously results. (Believe me, last time I did something similar, the run tooks 2 hours.)

By the way, The use of Chalk as adsorbent go back to Tswet times and still have some studies today, here and here for instance.