As many as 750 forensic scientists, lawyers, authors, students, professors and others are expected to gather next weekend at Duquesne University to look four decades into the past to see where the country is today and where it is headed.

The event drawing them is "Making Sense of the Sixties: A National Symposium on the Assassinations and Political Legacies of Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy and John F. Kennedy," to be held Friday through Sunday at the university's Power Center Ballroom.

Presented by the school's Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law and the Duquesne School of Law, the symposium will examine the assassinations from a forensic science, legal, historical, social, and political context.

Dr. Wecht, the renowned forensic pathologist, former Allegheny County coroner and institute namesake, said the symposium is fortuitously being convened in a presidential election year that's also the 45th anniversary of JFK's assassination and the 40th anniversaries of Bobby Kennedy's and Dr. King's assassinations. Dr. Wecht, who was involved in some manner in all three cases and has been critical of the findings that each was the result of a lone, crazed gunman, said much can be learned by examining "What might we have been? Where might we have gone?" had the killings not occurred.

"I often say, maybe in my darker moments, there once was a Rome," he said. "I believe this is a time that Americans need to think more than ever about who we are, what we are doing, where we are going and what we are going to be.

"Can we learn something by reviewing the history, who were these people, what were they doing, where were they at the time of their assassinations? And that brings it full circle to forensics -- what was done, what was not done, what should have been done to learn more about these assassinations?

"What we have here are three cases that have, to put it quite bluntly, been swept under the rug by the U.S. government."

Among the speakers will be Isaac Farris Jr., Dr. King's nephew and chief executive officer of The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change; William Pepper, attorney for Robert Kennedy's convicted killer Sirhan Sirhan and former counsel for Dr. King's convicted killer, the late James Earl Ray; Judge Joe Brown, host of the TV show "Judge Joe Brown" and the former Tennessee state criminal court judge who presided over Mr. Ray's appeals; and Dr. Henry C. Lee, the renowned forensic scientist who has assisted in more than 6,000 investigations worldwide, including the O.J. Simpson trial and Jon Benet Ramsey murder.

Among the topics to be discussed are "The Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. in 2008," "The Significance and Effect of the Assassinations," "Was Robert Kennedy the First 'Conspiracy Theorist?' " and "Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?"

For a complete schedule, list of speakers and registration, call 412-396-1330 or visit the Web site www.duq.edu/makingsense.