THAILAND: Dr Porntip Rojanasusan strides around the courtyard of Wat Yanyao, a forensic superstar with spiked purple hair and glittering gold eye-shadow now facing her sternest challenge. Lynne O'Donnell reports.
Her fury and frustration pierce the throat-searing atmosphere of death that has encased this Buddhist temple since the tsunami disaster.
"We have nothing here. What do we need? Everything," she says as she stands amid the eerie white vapour that rises from blocks of dry ice thrown between the black plastic body bags to slow the tropical rot.
"We are not prepared for such a big disaster as this."
Dr Porntip has taken charge of the grim task of identifying, tagging and bagging the thousands of victims of the tsunami.
She marches to and fro, calmly giving advice and support to the phalanx of foreign doctors and forensic experts who have descended on Thailand to help identify the dead.
"We have only 50 forensic scientists in Thailand, no pathologists, no forensic anthropologists. We have no government official based here, and no manager to manage things. I am doing it all myself.
"And because we have never developed the quality of forensics we cannot deal with the bodies in a thorough way," she said in an interview.
"The colour of the skin and hair tells us if bodies are Thai or foreigners. We have tried to identify them completely, but because we lack staff, equipment and knowledge we are just doing rough identification, by the face and clothes, and, finally, by DNA which we have to send to China for analysis."
As if to add further emphasis to her complaints, 300 bodies, all Asian, had to be exhumed early this week, after being wrongly identified before burial.
Over the past decade the diminutive doctor, a devout Buddhist, has acquired superstar status in Thailand as a warrior for justice who stands up to police corruption and mafia intimidation.
She believes she is protected by the ghosts of the dead whose rights she champions.
Unafraid of confronting a notoriously corrupt judicial system, Dr Porntip has sailed perilously close to personal danger by openly accusing police of torture and murder.
She relentlessly badgered the government to set up an independent forensic laboratory until a few years ago it established a Central Institute for Forensic Science and appointed her deputy director.
Still she hits her head against police interference in forensic evidence, and has become a human rights hero, often approached directly by people fighting to prove their innocence.
"I think goodness should protect me from danger from other people," she said. "So I believe the spirits of the dead will protect me. It's the Buddhist way."
To stretch her meagre state salary, she has become a best-selling author of books about the cases she has worked on, popularising the image of modern detective work.
Honoured by the king with the title Khunying, equivalent to Dame, and feted by a multinational cosmetic corporation as a "beauty of science," Dr Porntip shuns talk of her looks and expresses her hope that the tsunami will bring with it the lessons she has been trying to teach the Thai establishment.
"For seven years I've been telling the government that Thailand needs a missing persons bureau because we have 1,000 people every year who go unidentified. The police just throw the bodies in the river or burn them," she said.
"I have just one camera for all the forensic work throughout the country. Now, finally, they are very serious about forensics.
"Now that we have this disaster on an international scale, and we cannot cope with it ourselves, I think finally the message will get through."