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Taphophilia (dot) Com...
A repository of morbid curiosities:
Thanatology and Taphophile Issues, Cemetery,
Funeral Industry and Death Related News.
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Scientists reopen the Romanov mystery |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Monday, 12 July 2004 |
By Roger Highfield
July 12, 2004
An American team challenges DNA-based British research that bodies in a mass grave are the tsar's family, writes Roger Highfield
The fate of the Russian royal family was plunged into renewed controversy yesterday after scientists cast doubt over British DNA tests on bones recovered from a mass grave.
One of the most riveting detective stories of the last century supposedly ended in 1998, when the Russian government formally declared that the bones were those of the Romanovs, who were executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918.
But in a paper for the seventh International Ancient DNA Conference in Brisbane, a team from Stanford University near San Francisco will this week question tests by Home Office forensic scientists.
Dr Peter Gill and his team at the Forensic Science Service used genetic testing with the help of five cubic centimetres of blood from Prince Philip and other relatives of the Romanovs to announce in 1993 that they had proved "virtually beyond doubt" that broken bones found in a grave in Yekaterinburg in July 1991 were those of Tsar Nicholas II and members of his family.
The remains were brought to Britain by Dr Pavel Ivanov of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Dr Gill concluded that there was almost a 99 per cent probability that five of the nine skeletons were those of the tsar, the tsarina and three of their daughters.
But Dr Alec Knight, who conducted the study with colleagues at Stanford, the Russian Academy of Sciences, Eastern Michigan University and Los Alamos National Laboratory, claimed: "Our team has what appears to be overwhelming evidence to reject the conclusion of the identity of the remains as those of the Russian royal family."
Dr Knight and his team questioned the results, raised "forensic irregularities" and conducted an independent DNA analysis of the preserved finger of the late Grand Duchess Elisabeth - sister of Tsarina Alexandra, one of the 1918 victims.
Since the 1982 opening of Elisabeth's coffin in Jerusalem, the finger had been preserved in a reliquary at the New York home of Bishop Anthony Grabbe, the president of the now-disbanded Orthodox Palestine Society. Crucially, tests on the finger failed to match the tsarina's DNA reported by Dr Gill.
Though Dr Knight's trip was funded by the Russian Expert Commission Abroad - a group of scholars who challenge the assertion that the bones are royal - he maintains that his experiments were unbiased.
"[The Commission Abroad] didn't support the DNA tests or do the science," he said. "They just bought me the plane ticket and got me the sample. They had no control over the work."
Dr Knight argues that the Home Office results were too good to be true and doubts the researchers could have obtained such long stretches of DNA from old bones, particularly those that had spent more than 70 years in a shallow, wet earthen grave.
"Based on what we know now, those bones were contaminated," Dr Knight said, citing strong evidence that the bone samples were tarnished with fresh, less-degraded DNA - from an individual who handled the samples, a claim that is disputed by Dr Gill.
Experts are divided on the issue of DNA preservation. Dr Peter de Knijff, head of the Forensic Laboratory for DNA Research at Leiden University in the Netherlands, agrees that the Gill-Ivanov study was "unrealistically solid".
But Dr Tom Parsons of the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in Rockville, Maryland, has found that larger DNA fragments can survive.
Dr Knight said:"We have uncovered irregularities and inconsistencies (and very strange goings-on) in the case, and the results claimed by the DNA tests are essentially impossible.
"We are not questioning the integrity of Dr Gill or Dr Parsons but rather the actions of those in Russia who had control of all the samples, concluded at the outset that they were the royal family, acted with secrecy and deception, distributed the samples to the labs in other countries, participated in the analyses, wrote a report concluding identity, and then voted on acceptance of that report."
Dr Kevin Sullivan, a casework standards manager at the Forensic Science Service, another of the Home Office team, said: "We have every confidence in our results which have been reproduced and independently confirmed by two other world-renowned DNA laboratories.
"We were able to conclude that the remains were those of the Romanovs because they match the DNA of known living maternal relatives of the tsar and tsarina, including Prince Philip, all of which were analysed after the results were generated from the bones." He added: "The DNA result generated from the shrivelled finger is different to that of Prince Philip and therefore could not have come from the Grand Duchess Elisabeth or any other maternal relative."
The Stanford team's initial findings were reported in the January/February issue of the Annals of Human Biology but were dismissed at the time by Dr Gill, who told the journal Science that Dr Knight's research "comes across as vindictive and political".
But Dr Knight said the case against the original analysis had strengthened since the paper in the Annals. "Calling us names, as Dr Gill has done, will not help their fatally flawed position."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/07/12/wtsar12.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/07/12/ixworld.html |
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Taphophilia?
taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)
ORIGIN:
From the Greek words taphos, meaning "tomb" or "sepulcher" and philia, meaning "attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something"
DEFINITION: 1. An excessive interest in graves and cemeteries. 2. A love or fondness for funerals, graves, and cemeteries. 3. In psychiatry, a morbid attraction to graves and cemeteries
Quote Repository
“The final reward of the dead - to die no more.” Nietzsche
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