[100 years of identification (from man to his genome)]

It is a set of descriptive features or traits characterising an individual that serves as the basic for the identification of his person. Some of these traits are of interest mainly in police investigations; others, of which the interest is more particularly scientific, are rapidly gaining recognition. Anthropometric methods enable the identification of recidivist criminals. Anthropometric description is based on bone measurements taken in conjunction with the spoken portrait and recorded distinguishing marks--the features concretely represented in the descriptive photograph. This method was first supplemented and then supplanted, both for description and identification, by dactyloscopy. Investigations involving corpses are often extremely difficult. Several facts concerning bone and/or teeth could be relevant in determining the race, sex, height and age of the person whose remains are examined. Traces and stains as "clues" of hereditary and congenital properties of blood (erythrocytic, enzymatic, plasmic and leucocytic systems, factors and groups) and of sperm (with, in this case, secretor and non secretor properties) do provide and increasingly precise description of an individual but only a certain degree of probability for his identification; at best, they can only exclude an individual, but cannot prove his involvement. A knowledge of the patterns of the nucleotides in the Deoxyribo Nucleic Acids, which are the same in all the cells of an individual but differ from individual to individual, provides an ultimate means of arriving at certainty in the comparison: samples-suspect.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)