Dr. Bradley Wayne Boswell appeals his conviction on two counts of making false statements to the government. Dr. Boswell raises three issues on appeal. First, that the district court 2 erred in admitting evidence of DNA test results involving the comparison of swine serum samples. Second, that the evidence was insufficient to support the conviction on grounds he falsified the number of swine he claimed to have bled. Third, that Dr. Boswell was denied due process because the refrigerated serum samples deteriorated while kept in storage. We affirm.
Pseudorabies is a contagious air-transmitted disease that causes respiratory and reproductive problems in swine. The Pseudorabies Eradication Program is a joint federal, state, and swine industry project designed to eradicate the disease. The program pays veterinarians on a “fee-basis” to collect blood samples from swine on Iowa farms and submit the samples to the Iowa State University Diagnostic Laboratory. The veterinarians receive $20 for each farm visit and $4.50 per animal from which a blood sample is drawn.
Dr. Bradley Boswell was a licensed veterinarian at the time of the events in question. Dr. Boswell’s license was reinstated after it had been revoked by the Iowa Board of Veterinarian Medicine in 1991, for submitting falsified test records, failing to properly supervise employees, and violating food and drug regulations regarding use of illegal animal drugs.
Dr. Boswell agreed to work with the Animal Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) as a “Fee Veterinarian” under the Pseudorabies Control Agreement. Dr. Alison King, a field veterinarian employed by APHIS, asked Dr. Boswell in early 1998 to obtain serum samples from pigs on Thad Benskin’s farm. Dr. Boswell claims he bled some of the samples in February of 1998 with the assistance of Thad Bens-kin, and later returned to the farm and bled the rest of the animals with the help of his friend Bart Elder. In total, Dr. Boswell submitted one hundred and twenty samples from the Benskin farm to the ISU laboratory. Some of the blood serum samples tested positive for psuedorabies.
Dr. Boswell was surprised to learn that some of the samples had tested positive for pseudorabies. He then resubmitted allegedly identical samples to the ISU laboratory, claiming that he used the serum kept on reserve from the prior month’s bleeding. All of the resubmissions came back negative. Dr. Boswell also claims he decided to re-bleed and re-submit sixty samples from the Benskin farm. New samples arrived at the ISU lab on March 10 which also tested negative.
Dr. King was suspicious that test results from the same animal could move from positive to negative. Based on this suspicion, King and a group of federal veterinarians re-tested some of the swine on the Benskin farm. The federal investigators drew blood from a random sample of thirty sows and approximately 40 percent of the thirty sows tested positive for pseudora-bies.
Dr. King then sent Dr. Boswell’s original and resubmitted samples to the National Veterinarian Service Laboratory (NVSL). A lab technician at NVSL concluded that the original and resubmitted samples appeared to be adulterated. NVSL was also skeptical of Dr. Boswell’s assertions that the sets of samples he submitted were from the same animal. NVSL sent some of the two sets of samples to *1204 Stormont Laboratories for additional testing. Stormont tested the DNA of Dr. Boswell’s submissions by using a process called polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Stormont concluded that the paired samples were not from the same animals.
Dr. Boswell was charged by indictment with nine counts of making false statements and two counts of witness tampering. Count Two was dismissed at the government’s request prior to trial. The district court entered a judgment of acquittal on the two counts of tampering with a witness and the jury acquitted Dr. Boswell of six counts of making a false statement. The jury convicted Dr. Boswell on two counts of making false statements in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1001 (Counts Four and Five). These two counts of conviction involved separate written representations Dr. Boswell made on separate official government Pseudorabies Serology Forms with respect to the Bens-kin swine herd. Count Four charged that Dr. Boswell’s written statement on the February 1998 form that he had obtained the 120 blood samples from the Benskin herd in February 1998 was false because Dr. Boswell “well knew that he had bled less (sic) than 120 swine.” Count Five charged that the form submitted in March 1998, with the thirty blood samples from serum that Dr. Boswell claimed were from the same hogs bled at the Benskin farm in February 1998, was false because he then “well knew these [thirty] specimens were not from the same swine, and that he had not submitted specimens in accordance with federal and state regulations and instructions issued by the Veterinarian-in-Charge.”
I.
Dr. Boswell contends the district court abused its discretion by admitting into evidence DNA test results taken from swine serum samples Dr. Boswell submitted to ISU laboratories. A district court’s admission of DNA evidence is reviewed under an abuse of discretion standard.
See United States v. Beasley,
The admission of scientific expert testimony is dependent upon the court’s determination that the proposed testimony constitutes (1) scientific knowledge that (2) will assist the trier of fact to understand or determine a fact in issue.
See Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc.,
There is sufficient evidence that the district court was justified in permitting the admission of PCR test results of the swine DNA. First, the PCR process is approximately ten years old and it has undergone extensive testing.
See United States v. Gaines,
Dr. Boswell asserts that Michael Spencer’s “backhand (and incompetent) testimony” regarding the PCR method of DNA testing and the protocol at Stormont did not lay sufficient foundation for the admission of the lab results. The record does not support Dr. Boswell’s characterization of Mr. Spencer’s testimony. Mr. Spencer is a biochemist from the University of California, at Davis. After graduation Mr. Spencer was employed by the University of California, at Davis, in the department of biological chemistry at the School of Medicine. Mr. Spencer was later employed at Stormont from 1992 until 1998 and was involved solely in animal DNA testing.
Dr. Boswell also contends that even if the PCR method of DNA testing on swine blood is accepted in general, the results would still be inadmissible in this case because no protocol was followed. This assertion is not supported by the record. Although no written protocol for the analysis of swine blood at Stormont was introduced, Mr. Spencer did describe the method and procedures used to do the PCR analysis and, as mentioned above, verified that the procedure was an accepted one among DNA experts. Mr. Spencer testified that he performed the DNA tests on the blood samples submitted by Dr. Boswell and he detailed the reacting components he used in the process. Mr. Spencer also stated that the methodology he used is like a recipe where the amount of an ingredient may be varied, but the testing methodology has the same basic components. Dr. Boswell further argues that the test was not reliable given the condition of the samples. This assertion is contradicted by Mr. Spencer who stated that the samples were delivered in a sealed container by express courier and were then stored in a secure laboratory refrigerator.
This court previously held that any alleged deficiencies must so alter the PCR methodology as to make the test results inadmissable.
See Beasley,
II.
Dr. Boswell claims there was insufficient evidence for a reasonable jury to have found that he falsified Pseudorabies Serology Forms by overstating the number of animals he bled. This court examines the evidence in the light most favorable to the government and provides the government with the benefit of all reasonable inferences.
See United States v. Wilson,
Count Four of the indictment alleges that Dr. Boswell falsified the number of swine he claims to have bled at the Bens-kin farm. Dr. Boswell asserts that viewed in the light most favorable to the government, it must be concluded that Dr. Boswell bled forty-sixty pigs with Thad Bens-kin and later returned to the Benskin farm and bled “a lot” of pigs with Bart Elder. Dr. Boswell contends that based on this premise a reasonable jury could not have found a calculation that he bled 120 pigs was an overstatement. The court disagrees. First, there is evidence in the record that Mr. Elder never stepped foot on the Benskin farm, let alone bled pigs there. Second, even if this court were to accept this premise of Dr. Boswell, the conclusion that a reasonable jury must equate “a lot of pigs” with sixty to eighty pigs is wrong. We, therefore, conclude a reasonable jury could have determined .that Dr. Boswell did not return to the Benskin farm with Mr. Elder, or that if he did visit the farm, he did not bleed sixty to eighty pigs.
Dr. Boswell’s next assertion is that no 2‘easonable jury could have reached the conclusion that when he submitted the serology form for the thirty samples of the resubmission, he knew they were not a resubmission of the thirty prior samples from the Benskin farm, as was alleged in Count Five. The first thirty samples that Dr. Boswell submitted were received by ISU laboratory on February 21, 1998, and the second set of thirty samples were received on March 3, 1998. Dr. Boswell contends the samples were from the same swine and the same bleeding. Dr. Boswell’s assertion is contradicted by the scientists who received the submitted and resubmitted samples. The DNA tests conducted by Stormont provided evidence that the samples originally submitted by Dr. Boswell were not from the same animals as the second submission. We, therefore, conclude that a reasonable jury could have determined Dr. Boswell falsified the submissions.
III.
Dr. Boswell contends that Counts Four and Five should have been dismissed because the government knowingly allowed the swine serum samples to degrade. We defer to the district court’s factual findings with regard to the destruction of evidence. See
United States v. Clark,
Dr. Boswell asserts that the government exhibited bad faith by knowingly allowing the swine serum samples to deteriorate. This presumption is contradicted by the affidavit of Dr. Boswell’s expert witness, Dr. Christopher Chase. Dr. Chase states that: “In order for the samples of blood or serum to remain in a condition which would accurately reflect the sample was in the same in vivo condition from the animal, the samples must remain either refrigerated or frozen.” The samples in question were preserved in such a manner for testing according to the policies of ISU laboratories and NVSL personnel, and despite these efforts the samples deteriorated naturally over the course of time.
The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment does not require that law enforcement agencies preserve samples in order to introduce the results at trial.
See California v. Trombetta,
The judgment is affirmed.
Notes
. The Honorable Harold D. Vietor, United States District Judge for the Southern District of Iowa.