Very cool historical doc, thanks for sharing.

Curious if his idea of determining the race of the individual from the fingerprint is possible. Never heard that idea before.

Apparently the distribution of patterns (whorls, arches, loops, etc) varies by ethnicity, but not that much. So for an individual set of prints you can't determine anything reliably. It's not really genetic, rather determined mostly by the blood temperature and flow while you're a fetus, like a animal's precise fur pattern.