General Description

Legal medicine is a part of social medicine in which we study the medical issues in the legal system. It is categorized into fundamental legal medicine and applied legal medicine. Applied legal medicine is further divided into areas dealing with criminal, administrative, civil issues.

.Fundamental legal medicine is the area in which the principles of legal medicine and fundamental issues are examined and guideline for the applied areas is formed. Our research on genetic polymorphism belongs to this area.

For administrative application, we conduct postmortems and autopsies with their family's consent for those people whose cause of death appeared to be unnatural. Those include death caused by plunging and falling, accidental death, death by drowning, death by burning, death by freezing, death by electricity, and death by poisoning.

For civil application, we conduct determination of parentage for cases requested by the court for the purpose of the legitimization of the children, denegation of legitimacy, verification of parentage, and so on. We examine genetic polymorphism of concerned parties to determine whether two people genetically have a parent-child relationship or not.

The Faculty Members

General Description of the Research Activities

• Ancient DNA analyses of Jomon skeletons
• Analysis of the neural degeneration after brain trauma