Forensics
Blog Post
Vietnam Begins Huge Effort to Identify War Dead
An effort has begun in order to identify the remains of the Vietnam War. New smart DNA
technologies are being used in order to hopefully identify some of the over half million
missing Vietnamese soldiers and civilians. It is estimated to be the largest identification
project that has ever been taken on. “When I was a 21-year-old in the medical corps there, I
never imagined that such a project could ever become possible,” says Vietnam veteran
and genomics pioneer Craig Venter, head of the J. Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla,
California. “We thought of body counts as statistics — now, decades later, it may be
possible to put names to them.” The United States had identified most of its dead, but
Vietnam, stuck using outdated techniques has only identified a few hundred. They plan
on identifying the remains that can be found in the countryside of Vietnam. The leader of
the project is Wolfgang Hoppner, the Chief Executive of Bioglobe. He is the one who
proposed the project for Vietnam.
http://www.nature.com/news/vietnam-begins-huge-effort-to-identify-war-dead-1.19147?
No comments:
Post a Comment