The National Museum of Health and Medicine has received a microscope from the FBI that it used for crime analysis during some of its most sensational investigations during the last 30 years. Made by the Leitz Corp. in Wetzlar, West Germany, the microscope will be added to the more than 600 currently in the museum's collection, which comprise the world's largest and most representative collection in tracing the development of the basic tool of the bioscientist over the last 400 years.
"I'm glad to hear it didn't wind up in the scrap heap," said Bill Albrecht of Coeur d' Alene, Idaho, the retired FBI special agent who served as a firearms and tool marks examiner from 1975 to 1992 in the FBI's lab in Washington, D.C., where he used the microscope to compare fired bullets recovered from a crime scene with bullets fired from a weapon in the lab believed or suspected to have been used in the crime. "It was top of the line for its day."
Albrecht said that when he started as a trainee the microscope had already een in use for some time by the unit chief, but that he used it exclusively from then on until he transferred from the lab to another unit. He retired from the FBI in 1999.
"I've testified about 350 to 400 times as an expert witness all over the world," Albrecht said, noting that he participated in excess of 2,000 cases. "I was one of the last examiners on the weapon used to assassinate President Kennedy and more work was done on the assassination of President Kennedy on that microscope than on any other piece of equipment."
Other investigations for which the microscope was used were cases on:
- The assassination attempt made on President Reagan in 1981 outside of a Washington, D.C. hotel.
- The 1979 attack in Puerto Rico by the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN in Spanish) on a U.S. Navy bus taking sailors to a radar station, in which two sailors were killed and nine wounded.
- The killing in 1975 of two FBI agents on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
- The 1974 kidnapping in San Francisco of Patricia Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army.
"One thing that I liked about the microscope, compared to American-made microscopes, was the optics," Albrecht said, noting that it cost $30,000-$40,000 when it was purchased. "The Leitz was so good I could get pictures from that microscope others could not get."
The museum has a permanent exhibit on display, "Evolution of the Microscope," which includes the gold-tooled, leather-covered microscope used by Robert Hooke in the 17th century to prepare "Micrographia," which was the first book ever written about observations made through a microscope. The collection was started by Army Lt. Col. John S. Billings, the museum's curator from 1883 until 1893.
