While attending Junior Police Academy, Iftin became fascinated with fingerprints. She wondered whether fingerprint patterns varied by ethnicity. Background research suggested that the genes for skin color and fingerprints were indeed linked.
Iftin recruited 200 people from five ethic groups: African, Asian, Caucasian, East Indian, and Latin American. Early in her project, many of the people she approached balked at her request, believing that she worked for a government agency. Iftin struck on a way to reassure the volunteers: she recorded her results immediately and returned the inked cards. "That way, their fingerprints never left their sight," she said. She classified each person's fingerprint by its primary pattern: a loop, a whorl, or an arch. She found clear differences between groups: 26 percent of African volunteers displayed arches, whereas only 11 percent of Asian volunteers had them. Likewise, 67 percent of Latin American volunteers displayed loops, compared with 50 percent of Africans.
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