Laura K. Donohue (Georgetown University), Biomanipulation, 113 Geo. L.J. (forthcoming):
Scientific and technological advances in the latter part of the 20th century catapulted biometrics forward. Thus, Carleton Simon in 1935 may have postulated using retinal vasculature for biometric identification. But it took forty years for an Eyedentify patent to bring the idea to fruition. In 1937, John Henry Wigmore similarly anticipated using oscilloscopes to identify individuals by speech patterns. Decades later, digitization and speech processors made voiceprint identification possible. Biological discoveries led to the adoption of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequencing. And while Alphonse Bertillon in the late 19th century postulated iris distinctions, it was only in 1991 that John Daugman patented a means of extracting and encoding their unique patterns.