A MURDER HAS been committed. A stabbing. Police officers mill about the crime scene, sipping tasteless coffee, telling tasteless jokes. A well-dressed woman wafts in, sweeps her hair aside, and squats beside the victim, pursing her glossy lips in a gesture of concentration. She picks up the murder weapon — a hunting knife — and plucks what appears to be a crinkly hair from its blade. She bags the hair and, pausing to lay a hand on the shoulder of the sobbing widow, leaves.

Later, in a gleaming crime lab, the woman peers into a microscope. Her lovely bosom swells. “Nose hair,” she mutters, and then, “hmm.” We see a grainy flashback: a bystander at the building where the victim was found; a close-up of the bystander’s nostril and the thicket of distinctively crinkly hair within. Aha! Tracked down and confronted by the foxy female investigator (“Your nose hair was found at the scene!”), the suspect provides a teary confession. Case solved.

Such is the world of forensic science as depicted on CSI, CBS’s prime-time drama about a Las Vegas–based team of inordinately good-looking and savvy crime-scene investigators. The show, which touts itself as quasi-realistic, has built up quite a following since it first aired last October. Real-life forensic experts, however, are not generally huge fans. “I don’t watch the show,” says Dr. Carl Selavka, director of the Massachusetts State Police Crime Laboratory. “I have somebody who watches it for me and tells me what was wrong this week.”

“It’s unrealistic,” adds Lieutenant Kenneth Martin, 44, a local crime-scene investigator, who says he has watched maybe two minutes of the show to date. “We’re not that glamorous.” Actually, the shaven-headed, twinkly-eyed lieutenant is no slouch in the looks department. Yet he insists that crime-scene couture runs more to rubber boots and bodysuits than Gucci loafers and Armani. There are puddles of blood to be negotiated. Blood-borne pathogens and toxic chemicals. Maggots. “Sometimes you have to step through them,” Martin says, “and it’s like crunching on rice.”

CSI does indeed tend to overstate the physical attributes of crime-scene investigators — it’s pretty much Baywatch with blood. Far more troubling to those in the business, though, is that the show also creates a false impression of what forensic people do. “What that show does,” says Selavka, “is create the expectation that in 48 minutes — plus 12 minutes of commercials — it’s possible to provide resolution from the point of the crime being committed to the point of successful prosecution. Real life isn’t like that.”

Selavka and Martin grumble, but it could be worse. In fact, it has been worse. Five years ago, TV viewers watching the O.J. Simpson trial were treated to a nonstop litany of forensic blunders. Blood was trodden about, evidence was mishandled — there were even accusations of wrongdoing. The Simpson trial left the forensic field in shambles, its reputation in tatters. The moment Simpson’s so-called Dream Team successfully challenged the physical evidence that linked their client to the double murder, it was open season on forensic science. Defense attorneys everywhere jumped on the anti-CSI bandwagon, challenging, as a matter of course, the professionalism and the integrity of forensic investigators — often to great effect.

Considering the damage the Simpson trial did to his profession, it’s surprising to hear Selavka say that O.J. was “the best thing that ever happened” to forensic science. What the O.J. trial did, he explains, was compel the field to clean up its act, leading to systematic improvements in the way evidence is collected, preserved, and documented. Without that ill-fated bloody glove, Selavka continues, we wouldn’t have the “uncontaminated crime-scene collections, good lab analysis, and reliable forensic defense of evidence in the courtroom” that we have today.

These days, forensic technology is touted as the key to everything from prosecuting war crimes to resolving questions of parentage. Indeed, the field’s cachet has risen to the extent that it is, in effect, the star of a hit TV show. Suddenly, forensic investigation is not only legitimate, but chic. In the past few years since the O.J. trial, real-life forensic science has enjoyed some spectacular, high-profile successes. The Jeffrey Curley murder was solved thanks to some fine forensic sleuthing, as was the 1995 gangland killing of Suffolk County assistant district attorney Paul McLaughlin. The arrest of Robert Tulloch and James Parker, suspects in the murders of Dartmouth professors Half and Susanne Zantop, came about largely as a result of forensic work. The list seems to grow daily.

As these successes increase, so too does the perception of the field as a sort of magic bullet. Forensic scientists are viewed as crime-fighting prophets, their microscopes an oracle. They seem to have access — to paraphrase William Blake — to the Auguries of Guilt: “To see a Murderer in a Grain of Sand/And a Rapist in a Carpet Fiber,/Hold a blood stain in the palm of your hand/And gain conviction in an hour.”

“We’re really at the dawning of a new age,” Selavka says. “This is a wonderful time to be in forensic science.”