The Federal Bureau of Investigation opened its forensic crime laboratory in Washington, D.C. in 1932, initially in a small room at the Old Southern Railway Building. The laboratory offered scientific analysis of physical evidence — fibres, hair, firearms, documents, blood — to police departments across the country free of charge. Over subsequent decades it became the world's largest forensic laboratory, processing evidence from hundreds of thousands of cases annually and setting global standards for forensic analysis.

The FBI laboratory represented the decisive institutionalisation of forensic science in American law enforcement and helped embed forensic evidence as a cultural expectation of criminal justice. It shaped the golden age of American detective and crime fiction by making laboratory analysis a standard narrative element. Later, revelations of systematic contamination, bias, and error at the FBI lab — exposed in the 1990s — generated a significant body of literary and journalistic writing on the fallibility of forensic evidence and institutional trust.