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Bringing out the Dead Alison Abbott Reviews the Story of How a DNA Forensics Team Cracked a Grisly Puzzle

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Bringing out the Dead Alison Abbott Reviews the Story of How a DNA Forensics Team Cracked a Grisly Puzzle BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT DADO RUVIC/REUTERS/CORBIS DADO A forensics specialist from the International Commission on Missing Persons examines human remains from a mass grave in Tomašica, Bosnia and Herzegovina. FORENSIC SCIENCE Bringing out the dead Alison Abbott reviews the story of how a DNA forensics team cracked a grisly puzzle. uring nine sweltering days in July Bosnia’s Million Bones tells the story of how locating, storing, pre- 1995, Bosnian Serb soldiers slaugh- innovative DNA forensic science solved the paring and analysing tered about 7,000 Muslim men and grisly conundrum of identifying each bone the million or more Dboys from Srebrenica in Bosnia. They took so that grieving families might find some bones. It was in large them to several different locations and shot closure. part possible because them, or blew them up with hand grenades. This is an important book: it illustrates the during those fate- They then scooped up the bodies with bull- unspeakable horrors of a complex war whose ful days in July 1995, dozers and heavy earth-moving equipment, causes have always been hard for outsiders to aerial reconnais- and dumped them into mass graves. comprehend. The author, a British journalist, sance missions by the Bosnia’s Million It was the single most inhuman massacre has the advantage of on-the-ground knowl- Bones: Solving the United States and the of the Bosnian war, which erupted after the edge of the war and of the International World’s Greatest North Atlantic Treaty break-up of Yugoslavia and lasted from 1992 Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), an Forensic Puzzle Organization had to 1995, leaving some 100,000 dead. With organization created in Sarajevo in 1996 that CHRISTIAN JENNINGS picked up images of the war’s end in sight, the Serbian army had has a central role in the story. In 2000, the Palgrave Macmillan: large groups of men to worry about hiding the evidence. In the ICMP launched the world’s first systematic 2013. on open ground near late summer, they brought out the bulldozers attempt to apply DNA-identification tech- Srebrenica. Subse- again, roughly dug up the decaying bodies, niques to large numbers of people. Its labs quent images showed that the men had dis- threw them into dumper trucks and distrib- have since been used to help to identify indi- appeared and large areas of disturbed earth uted them between 30 or so more remote viduals in other large groups killed in natural had appeared. Over the following weeks, as burial sites. After the war shuddered to a halt disasters, accidents and wars — including the bodies were relocated, images showed in the autumn, these the 2013 terrorist attack on Nairobi’s West- more stretches where the soil was newly hastily disguised sites, NATURE.COM gate shopping centre, in which dozens of disturbed. with their cargoes of For a Nature special victims were mangled beyond conventional In 1997 and 1998, a team of archaeolo- disconnected bones, on science in court, recognition. gists and forensic experts — put together were discovered. see: As Jennings shows, the organization’s first by the Netherlands-based United Nations Christian Jennings’s go.nature.com/ez6pwk job was a masterwork from hell that involved International Criminal Tribunal for the 28 NOVEMBER 2013 | VOL 503 | NATURE | 465 © 2013 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS former Yugoslavia — began excavat- ing the burial sites. They pieced together some evidence of when and how the mass killings had taken place from clues such as the bodies’ states of decay, the times and dates on their self-winding watches, INTERFOTO/AKG-IMAGES and the characteristic patterns of damage caused to skulls by bullets. Analysis of the colours and textures of soils pointed to where some of the bones had first been dumped. For example, chips of glass indicated burial near a glass factory in the area. The task of identifying the bones was exquisitely difficult. The bulldozers had broken up the bodies, and the pieces had been mixed up in the dumper trucks transporting them to new burial sites. DNA analysis of each bone was the only possible method of conclusive identifica- tion, so the ICMP set up its lab. Left to right: Werner Heisenberg, Max von Laue and Otto Hahn in Göttingen, Germany, in 1946. At first, this remarkable operation ran on a shoestring. Members invented PHYSICS cheap alternatives for equipment, such as adapting a chicken rotisserie from the local market to stir DNA solutions. All of these staff (many of them “massively Overhearing Heisenberg adaptable” graduates, Jennings writes) were locals, who could easily commu- Ann Finkbeiner ponders a script inspired by the 1945 nicate with the traumatized relatives of internment of eminent German physicists in England. the missing. This helped them to collect the blood samples for the DNA analysis needed for comparison with DNA from y July 1945, the Allies and Germans had Farm Hall the Germans came to the bones. spent years racing each other to build an DAVID CASSIDY building the bomb. Each staff member was trained in a atomic bomb. The German physicists Staged reading in Bernstein thought the Santa Fe, New Mexico: specific aspect of this analysis, which Bwere certain of their technological superiority, tension was the Ger- May 2014. was then carried out in modular fashion. but had not even taken the first step — build- man scientists’ con- The remains were first prepared for DNA ing a working reactor. The Manhattan Project struction of a version of reality in which they extraction, then scientists, who had panicked that the Germans had refused to build the bomb for Hitler on “More than ground into pow- would build this evil thing first, had made four principle. Cassidy, however, focuses on their 80% of the der in the Republic bombs. But that July, neither side knew for realization of their technological inferiority — remains were of Srpska, now an certain how close the other had come. So, just on how they rationalized what he calls their returned to independent Ser- after the Nazi surrender, the Allies captured own “fall into failure”. their families bian enclave within ten German nuclear scientists — including Cassidy quotes verbatim from the tran- for burial.” Bosnia. Next, the Werner Heisenberg, Otto Hahn, Max von script, putting the stiffly translated German powder was trans- Laue, Kurt Diebner and Carl Friedrich von into American English. He narrows the cast ferred to Sarajevo for DNA extraction. Weizsäcker — sequestered them in Farm Hall, down to five scientists, including Heisenberg, Through that analysis, more than 80% of a country house in deepest Cambridgeshire, who led the German nuclear programme and the remains were returned to their families UK, and bugged their rooms. won the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics; Hahn, for burial. Transcripts of the taped conversations were who co-discovered fission; and Diebner, an That story needed to be told. But declassified and published almost 50 years engineer. Their military minder at Farm Hall, Bosnia’s Million Bones is a confusing read. later in Operation Epsilon (University of Cali- Theodore Rittner, has arranged for the secret It weaves in other, undoubtedly impor- fornia Press, 1993) and annotated in physicist taping, translation and transcription of their tant, stories — such as the manhunt for Jeremy Bernstein’s Hitler’s Uranium Club (AIP conversations for British and US intelligence. the war criminals responsible for the Press, 1995). But they begged to be a play. The scientists settle in and get comfort- massacres — and diverts frequently into Now David Cassidy, historian of physics at able. They talk. issues involving unrelated wars. Its struc- Hofstra University in New York, has written They try to figure out why they’re being ture is undisciplined, muddling time- a one-act script called Farm Hall. Whereas held. To keep them out of the hands of the lines and sometimes even basic numbers a recent produced play by Alan Brody (also Russians? Because the Allies want to know (such as the number of victims identi- called Operation Epsilon) focused on the sci- what they know? They compliment them- fied by a particular date). But those who entists’ morals in trying to build a bomb for selves on being ahead of the Allies, who — make it through will emerge shaken, and Hitler, Cassidy looks at the scientists’ accounts they think — cannot build a reactor in which educated. ■ of their failure to do so. uranium can be collected into a near-critical Both playwrights had to choose, from mass and begin fission. They argue about why Alison Abbott is Nature’s senior the mess of reality, one central tension. I they never actually built the reactor: because European correspondent. thought that the tension might be how close Heisenberg insisted on using his design rather 466 | NATURE | VOL 503 | 28 NOVEMBER 2013 © 2013 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.
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