Mr. Latona. Sure, you can cut your finger off. You can resort to what is known as—they can be transferred. You can slice off a pattern from one finger and place it on another but you will see the scar. They can have what is known as surgical planing.
Representative Boggs. That is what I was thinking about.
Mr. Latona. That can be done, too.
Representative Boggs. What happens then?
Mr. Latona. What happens is that you lose the ridge area and you will simply have a scar. There will be no more pattern. Now, the pattern is formed by what are known as dermal papilla, which is below the epidermis or outer layer of skin. As long as you only injure the outer surface the ridge formation will grow back exactly the same as it was before. If you get down to the dermal papilla, which lay like this——
Mr. Eisenberg. You are drawing an illustration on the board which shows short, broad, downward strokes.
Mr. Latona. If you destroy or injure these to the extent that there is actual bleeding, you will get a permanent scar.
Fingerprints can be destroyed or scarred in such a fashion that we would not be able to successfully classify them.
Mr. Dulles. Do criminals do that?
Mr. Latona. Yes; they do. We have had one case, probably the most successful was known as the so-called Roscoe Pitts case. This was a fugitive who in order to avoid identification went to an unscrupulous doctor who performed an operation and he did so by virtue of first cutting five slits on one side of his chest. Then he removed the pattern areas, what we call the pattern areas, which would consist of removal of the whole core area down to the delta area, sliced that off.