Personhood Week: When Dead Bodies Become Dead People
On the night of July 19, 1916, halfway through the First World War, troops from Australia and Great Britain attacked German positions in Fromelles, in northern France. The Germans were prepared. The battled ended the next day, after thousands of Brits and Aussies had died. It was, according to amagazine produced by the Australian government, “the worst 24 hours in Australia’s entire history.”
In 2002, an Australian amateur historian named Lambis Englezos visited Fromelles and noticed that the number of graves was far fewer than the number of soldiers reported missing from the battle. He suspected that the Germans had buried many in mass graves, and over the next few years he convinced reporters at 60 Minutes Australia of his theory. Its eventualbroadcast, as well as reports from Red Cross records and aerial photos, led to an official investigation. In 2008 and 2009, archaeologists dug up five mass graves, containing 250 bodies.
Then came the question of identifying them. After more than 90 years, standard identification methods — fingerprints, medical and dental records — weren’t available. But there was DNA, deep inside the bone marrow. So the researchers extracted samples from the remains and then re-buried each body in its own grave.
This launched the Fromelles Identification Project (FIP), a joint effort by the Australian and British governments to find living descendants of the dead soldiers and convince them to donate their own DNA for matching. (The Y chromosome, passed through male descendants, changes very little from one generation to the next; same goes for mitochondrial DNA that is passed down through the female line.) So far 1,000 Australians have donated DNA to the effort, and 144 soldiers have been identified by name. The scientific, ethical and privacy concerns surrounding this project are fascinating. But before digging in to those, I think it’s important to address why people (via their governments) are willing to put so much effort and resources into identifying dead bodies in the first place.
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