Dr. Pornthip Rojanasunand

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Hari ini mari kita lihat dan teliti sumbangan seorang tokoh yang hebat dalam bidang forensik dari Thailand. Beliau ialah Dr. Pornthip Rojanasunand, seorang wanita yang dilahirkan pada 21 Disember 1955. Seorang ahli pathologis forensik yang kerjanya membedah mayat orang dan mengenalpasti punca-punca kematian seseorang. Di negaranya sendiri beliau dikenali sebagai seorang wanita yang berani, seorang pakar dan seorang aktivis hak asasi manusia yang menyifatkan dirinya sebagai seorang yang berkhidmat untuk membela mayat yang tidak lagi boleh bercerita kepada kita tentang apa yang berlaku sehingga kepada detik kematiannya. Seorang isteri dan ibu ..selalu dilihat dengan fesyen rambut pelbagai warna..(bukan suruh tiru...wanita Islam kena tutup aurat )..jarang-jarang senyum...wanita hebat yang sesekali mencabar kerja-kerja polis dan pemimpin politik negaranya sendiri...dia mahsyur di negaranya sendiri dan kini mula dikenali di negara kita kerana penampilannya di mahkamah Malaysia baru-baru ini (saya tak campur hal politik dalam negeri ..saya lurus..saya objektif dan saya cuba berlaku adil ) kerana dia bekerja atas prinsip yang jelas untuk manusia dan kemanusaan.

Seringkali saya menulis dalam bahasa Melayu dan sekerap itu juga saya ingin memuatkan sebanyak mungkin artikel yang berguna yang berkaitan dengan tajuk yang saya pilih. Anda mungkin bertanya mengapa ya? jawapannya ialah kerana saya ingin sesuatu subjek yang saya pilih dilihat dan diamati secara menyeluruh..dunia ini bulat...akan tetapi dahulu kala orang mengatakan dunia ini mendatar (leper) hanya kerana masa orang itu mengeluarkan pendapat dan kenyataan ..dia hanya mengetahui setakat itu sahaja...jadi wahai teman....anda yang saya hormati...lihatlah dengan mata hati....kerana jarang sekali ia menipu...tapi sebelum itu bersihkanlah hati...kerana kalau hati tak bersih dan kotor....sama saja kita melihat dengan mata kasar....takkan nampak yang benar ....berfalsafah pulak saya..huhuhu....

Mungkin ada antara anda...akan bertanya " awat yang dia tak mau tulis sepenuhnya dalam bahasa Melayu atau terjemahkan saja dalam bahasa Melayu saja? kan senang nak baca..."mai sini cek nak habaq....byk artikel asal ditulis dalam bahasa Inggeris...kita kenalah hormat penulis asal....lagipun kalau saya nak tolong terjemah ..ia akan mengambil masa yang lama dan satu lagi ...maksud yang benar-benar nak disampaikan oleh penulis asal akan terpesong"....mai la kita belajaq baca dalam bahasa inggeris...bukan pasai bahasa ni hebat..tapi pasai sampai la ni...dalam internet banyak bahan ilmiah kita boleh dapat dengan senang di internet..lain la kalau satu hari nanti semua seluruh dunia berfokus ke Malaysia kerana Lembah Siberjaya kita jadi tempat utama orang mendapatkan ilmu dan menghasilkan ilmu....jadi masa itu insyaallah akan sampai juga....masa yang mana bahasa Melayu menjadi bahasa utama alam siber .....Insyallah...

Jom kita baca kisah hebat kerjaya seorang ahli pathologis forensik

THE SATURDAY PROFILE; On Death's Trail, a Detective Larger Than Life
By SETH MYDANS
Published: Saturday, April 13, 2002

THE SATURDAY PROFILE;

On Death's Trail, a Detective Larger Than Life","description":

"THE mild-mannered bank manager poked his head into the doorway, then quickly pulled it back. His wife was at work, and he did not want to look. He has never looked. He is afraid of corpses. If the body on the stainless steel table inside had somehow awakened for a moment, it might have jumped, too, with shock.

THE mild-mannered bank manager poked his head into the doorway, then quickly pulled it back. His wife was at work, and he did not want to look. He has never looked. He is afraid of corpses.
If the body on the stainless steel table inside had somehow awakened for a moment, it might have jumped, too, with shock.
Bending over it, with hungry fascination, was a woman whose head was covered with dark red spikes, whose lips were the color of dried blood, whose gloved fingernails, as she prepared to slice the body open, were encrusted with spangles.

Or perhaps the body would have said, as a dying accident victim once did, ''Oh, hello, Dr. Death.''
Once someone has seen Dr. Pornthip Rojanasunand, 47, the country's most famous pathologist, on television or on the cover of one of her best-selling books, it is impossible to forget her. She may be the strangest looking woman in Thailand.

Outlandish outfits. Platform shoes. Hair that seems to say, ''Surprise!'' in orange, rust, scarlet, mauve, chestnut. And, most unnerving, an absolutely straight face.
But Dr. Pornthip has earned her nickname not only through her flamboyance -- and this is not a nation of flamboyant people -- but also through her professional innovations and her straight talk about crime and social issues.

Almost single-handedly she has expanded the nearly nonexistent field of forensic pathology, has belatedly introduced DNA testing to Thailand and has brought some order to the procedures of her calling, detective work on the dead.

IN a country where power and status are something like a business-class ticket that offers special perks and comforts, Dr. Pornthip's candor about high-profile crimes has made her a real nuisance to the police and to those they protect.

It may seem surprising to find a pathologist on the front lines of social change, but Dr. Pornthip, in calling a bullet wound a bullet wound, is a leading voice in the struggle to replace the rule of privilege with the rule of law.

''The chief of police hates me,'' she said, ''because the police use a double standard and for me, everyone is equal. An unidentified body is the same as a powerful man to me.''
When the police quickly announced two years ago that the death of a member of Parliament had been a suicide, Dr. Pornthip received death threats when she told the press that photographs of the body made that seem unlikely.

The police revised their report.
When the police claimed in a sensational case last year that they had immediately identified the dismembered remains of the victim through DNA analysis, she pointed out that such tests take much more time. Again the police backed down.

Until her public criticisms brought a change in procedure two years ago, the police alone conducted autopsies on victims of police shootings or people who died in custody.
''How can such a system be allowed to exist?'' she said. ''How can the public be certain that autopsies conducted by the police forensic institute in cases of extrajudicial killings are not modified to help the police?''

Dr. Pornthip is a self-made specialist as well as a self-made celebrity. Much of what she knows about her field she taught herself from books; at the time she began, there were only a half-dozen forensic pathologists in Thailand.

She found, in the tales told by the dead, a way to discomfit the privileged. ''I didn't like powerful people to take advantage of others,'' she said. ''I thought I could do something about that.''
The relatives of one murdered man asked for her help when the police said, unconvincingly, that he had been killed by gangsters. Her autopsy found a bullet that provided evidence implicating the police themselves in the killing.

It is dramas like these that make her four books compulsive reading.
Her tales of her medical detective work, interspersed with how-to hints on dissection and bone-cutting, are told in chapters with irresistible titles like ''My First Corpse,'' ''Death by Tapeworm'' and ''I'm Not Scared of Ghosts, I'm Just Scared of the Smell.''

THE SATURDAY PROFILE; On Death's Trail, a Detective Larger Than Life
By SETH MYDANS
Published: Saturday, April 13, 2002
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On the cover of one book she is dressed in vestal white, cradling a skull. On the cover of her latest, titled ''Teaching With Corpses'' and published this year, she appears with her husband and daughter, all three of them in bright red outfits.
Dr. Pornthip is not, although she looks it, a person of the night.
Rather, she is a person of the predawn, when it is always darkest. She arrives most days at Ramathibodi Hospital by 5 a.m., and as the living world still sleeps, she is alone with her cold corpses, slicing, sawing and cracking bones.
From these swollen and discolored bodies she extracts the jewels of her craft, the liver, the heart, the kidney, the last dinner. Sliced and studied under an electron microscope, they reveal their secrets.

HER own secrets, hidden under her gaudy exterior, are harder to dislodge. Her parents, both scientists and teachers, tried, in vain, to steer her toward conformity, insisting that she study medicine rather than architecture.
Pathology attracted her, she said, because of the freedom and detective work involved and the chance to confront official hypocrisy.

Her artistic side found other outlets: drawing, cooking, homemaking, collecting popular music and the creation of her public image: long black dresses, leopard-skin tops, rainbow tunics, just about anything that no one else, not even rebellious kids, is wearing.

But she becomes suddenly colorless when asked the meaning of her visual statement. ''It cheers me up,'' she says, as if she had never given it a thought. Or, ''I think it makes me look younger.''
Special occasions hardly affect her look; perhaps a handful of glitter in her hair. ''I don't like going to parties,'' she said unexpectedly. ''I don't like a lot of people looking at me.''
If this is irony, it is seamless.

Her husband, Wichai, the bank manager, is her straight man, dry and low-key. For the first years of their marriage, he claims, he had no idea his wife worked with cadavers. ''I just thought she looked into a microscope and analyzed things.'' When at last he visited her workplace, he said, ''I ran.''

Their 9-year-old daughter, Nong Ten, seems to have a better idea of what her mother does than Dr. Pornthip's husband did at first. At school she has started drawing pictures of imaginary autopsy rooms and machines for extracting bones from bodies.
It is honorable work, her mother explains.
''I tell her that I have a duty to work with dead bodies to find out the truth about their death,'' Dr. Pornthip said. ''And if we do good, good will come back to us.''

For all her experience with cadavers, Dr. Pornthip does not seem to have given a great deal of thought to the manner of her own death.
She has worked on a man who choked to death on a banana and a snake-handler who was strangled by one of his pets. She has dealt with epidemics of suicide by jumping, hanging or swallowing rat poison.

None of that seems to have inspired her fertile imagination.

Like just about everybody else, she said she would prefer to die in her sleep.

Pornthip Rojanasunand
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Khunying Pornthip Rojanasunand M.D. (Thai: พรทิพย์ โรจนสุนันท์, sometimes transliterated as Porntip Rojanasunan, RTGS: Phonthip Rotchanasunan; born: 21 December 1955) is a Thai forensic pathologist, author and human rights activist. She has repeatedly publicly stated that she has come across evidence of police abuses during her work.[citation needed]
Pornthip presently is Director of the Central Institute of Forensic Science, Ministry of Justice, in Bangkok and introduced DNA evidence to Thailand.[citation needed]
Before her public criticism, autopsies of victims of alleged police abuse were carried out in the police's own forensic institute; this has since changed.[citation needed]
During the anti-drug campaign by the government of Thaksin Shinawatra in early 2003, more than 1,000 people vanished or were killed; Pornthip has shown that several of these deaths were caused by police.[citation needed]
She has written several books about her work. The most prominent pathologist in Thailand, she gets regular media coverage with her allegations of abuse, and by her own admission, her unorthodox appearance: punk-rock hair dyed purplish red,[1] eccentric clothing and glittery eye makeup, and platform shoes.[2] The Thai English-language newspaper The Nation chose Pornthip, along with Chuwit Kamolvisit and Chote Wattanachet, as persons of the year for 2003.[citation needed] She was honored by King Bhumibol Adulyadej with the title "Khunying".[citation needed]
In the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, Pornthip took charge of the effort to identify victims of the tsunami in the Phang Nga region.[3] She and her team were widely praised for their hard work and dedication, but on January 13, 2005 Police General Nopadol Somboonsab complained that the police's identification centre in Phuket should have charge of all identification operations. Many commentators and Pornthip herself attributed the late intervention to Nopadol's personal vendetta against her.[4] Nopadol was ultimately successful, and the Phang Nga operation was closed down on February 3, 2005.[5]
The 2005 National Geographic documentary Crime Scene Bangkok (2004) tells her life story and covers her work in Phang Nga after the tsunami and her battle with the police.[6]
In June 2009, she was one of the pathologists investigating the death of actor David Carradine.[7]
In October 2009, she concluded that Malaysian Democratic Action Party employee Teoh Beng Hock, who had been detained by the Malaysian federal Government's Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission had an 80% probability of being murdered. [8]

Devoted doctor takes on her toughest challenge
She's trying to ID thousands of victims
Lynne O'Donnell, Chronicle Foreign Service
Wednesday, January 5, 2005


(01-05) 04:00 PDT Phang-Nga, Thailand -- Porntip Rojanasunan, Thailand's punky Doctor Death, strides around the courtyard of the Yan Yao Temple, a forensic superstar with spiked purple hair and glittering gold eye shadow now facing her sternest challenge.

Her fury and frustration pierce the throat-searing atmosphere of death that has encased this Buddhist temple since the Dec. 26 tsunami turned it into a morgue for 1,800 rotting corpses, many still unidentified.

"We have nothing here. What do we need? Everything," she says as clouds of eerie white vapor swirl up from blocks of dry ice thrown between black plastic body bags to slow the tropical rot. "We are not prepared for such a big disaster as this."

Dr. Porntip, as she is known in Thailand, has taken charge of the grim task of identifying, tagging and bagging the thousands of victims of the tsunami that engulfed the tourist mecca of southern Thailand. So far, around 5, 000 bodies have been found, and most of those yet to be buried or cremated are stored at three temples in Phang-Nga province, north of Phuket island, where the vast majority of victims died.

Yan Yao Temple has been transformed by necessity into Thailand's biggest morgue. Every minute, more bodies are brought through the arched temple gates, some in hastily knocked-together coffins stacked in trucks or on the back of tricycle rickshaws, some in plastic bags dragged in by volunteers wearing face masks against the stench.

The remains of the dead are laboriously unloaded onto the concrete courtyard, patrolled by young Thai volunteers wearing yellow rubber overalls and carrying backpacks of disinfectant that they constantly spray on the ground and on the unending flow of people who come to help or inquire about lost loved ones.

Refrigerated containers line the driveway, and former market stalls now distribute rubber gloves, rubber boots, face masks, bottles of mineral water and cups of instant noodles. The open-air prayer hall also offers free telephone and Internet services for the bereaved.
Dr. Porntip, 48, marches to and fro, calmly giving advice and support to the phalanx of foreign doctors and forensic experts -- Britons, Australians, New Zealanders, Belgians, Dutch, French, Israelis -- who have descended on Thailand to help identify the dead.

The multilingual Babel in the courtyard is evidence, Dr. Porntip says, that the recent tragedy has vindicated her criticism of the Thai government for not taking her profession seriously.
"We have only 50 forensic scientists in Thailand, no pathologists, no forensic anthropologists. We have no government official based here, and no manager to manage things. I am doing it all myself. And because we have never developed the quality of forensics, we cannot deal with the bodies in a thorough way," she said.

"The color of the skin and hair tells us if bodies are Thai or foreigners. We have tried to identify them completely, but because we lack staff, equipment and knowledge, we are just doing rough identification, by the face and clothes, and finally by DNA, which we have to send to China for analysis. '' As if to add emphasis to her complaints, 300 bodies, all Asian, had to be exhumed early last week after being wrongly identified before burial.

Over the past decade, the diminutive doctor, a devout Buddhist, has acquired superstar status in Thailand as a warrior for justice who stands up to police corruption and gangster intimidation. Unafraid of confronting a notoriously corrupt judicial system, she has risked personal danger by openly accusing police of torture and murder. She relentlessly badgered the government to set up an independent forensic laboratory until it established a Central Institute for Forensic Science a few years ago and appointed her deputy director.

"I think that goodness should protect me from danger from other people," she said. "So I believe that the spirits of the dead will protect me. It's the Buddhist way."

To stretch her meager state salary, she has become a best-selling author of books about the cases she has worked on, popularizing the image of modern detective work. Honored by the king with the title Khunying, equivalent to the British honorific Dame, Dr. Porntip says she hopes the tsunami will bring with it the lessons she has been trying to teach the Thai establishment.

"For seven years, I've been telling the government that Thailand needs a missing persons bureau because we have a thousand people every year who go unidentified. The police just throw the bodies in the river or burn them," she said. "I've been telling the ministers that when the police find an unidentified skull or other body parts, they must not destroy them, they must call me to come and get the body and do a DNA analysis. Now that we have this disaster on an international scale, and we cannot cope with it ourselves, I think finally the message will get through.''

While she is recognized wherever she goes and often mobbed by autograph hunters, Dr. Porntip has also earned enemies. Recently, she was sued by a regional police department after announcing that a young man accused of rape had been beaten to death during interrogation rather than by fellow prisoners, as police claimed.

Many of her detractors deride her wild hairstyle and casual dress, which contrast sharply with the accepted norms in conservative Thailand, and accuse her of being an attention-seeker. She brushes off criticism, saying her individual style aims "to make me happy, to compensate for the work, not to be an actress."

After Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's wife, Potjaman, visited the temple early last week to offer her help in identifying the dead, and was politely turned down, Dr. Porntip said: "Our prime minister is aware of economics but he does not understand justice. No one understands that I want to do this type of work to help people. I am very tired, but I feel happy and satisfied when I can identify someone for their families." Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/01/05/MNGPEALB211.DTL#ixzz0UlHOgeOZ