Category Archives: Transhuman News

During the last three years, a skull and two femur or thigh bones have been found off the Wexford and Waterford coasts.

Garda authorities were informed by their detectives that special DNA testing in England was required as testing in Ireland had not managed to extract the DNA and identify the remains.

Garda were also told it is possible the remains may be some of the crew of either the Pere Charles, the Maggie B or the Honey Dew II.

The bodies of nine men from those tragedies were never recovered.

Garda say the cases are still being actively investigated and the matter has been raised in the Dil.

John Hennessy, a brother of the Pere Charles skipper Tom Hennessy, said the remains are lying in storage in a fridge in Dublin and are still unidentified.

He told RT News that families would be willing to discuss paying to have the bones tested if it was only financial considerations that were stalling the investigation.

Garda were told last year the cost could be up to 12,000 but that included testing on other bones, the identity of which have since been ascertained, so the cost would now be lower.

Mr Hennessy said he believes the Government has handled the situation badly, saying all that the families wanted was to have the two bones and the skull sent to England to see if the DNA can be extracted.

Garda say inquires to establish the identity of the human remains have not yielded any positive results so far.

Read more:
Families offer to help with bones' DNA tests

Argentinean Mercedes Doretti has successfully identified the remains of hundreds of Central American immigrants who have perished on their dangerous journey north

By Brendan Borrell

DIGGING FOR JUSTICE: Forensic anthropologist Mercedes Doretti led a team of researchers identifying remains of Los Desaparecidos--the disappeared ones--in her native Argentina. Her work there continues today, as evidence she personally collected in the 1980s is still making its way through the country's legal system. Image: Courtesy of Richard Renaldi

"Seora, go and search for yourself." With those words, Mexican authorities sent away the grieving mother seeking clues about her daughter's killer. The year was 2001, after those authorities had discovered the bodies of eight young women in a cotton field near Ciudad Jurez on the Texas-Mexico border, across the Rio Grande from the U.S. city of El Paso. Police were unlikely to solve their cases, just like those of the hundreds of women who had been sexually abused, mutilated and killed in this lawless town, where this year alone another 60 women and girls have been murdered. The government's handling of the "Campo Algodonero" murders stood out as an egregious violation of human rights for the way the authorities botched the case and mishandled the women's remains.

The victims' mothers even came to doubt that the remains authorities had given them were their own children. In December 2003 they began working with Mercedes Doretti, a New York-based forensic anthropologist and co-founder of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team to get help in identifying the bodies.

Doretti's work in Ciudad Jurez revealed that law enforcement had misidentified three of the eight remains furnished, and her report to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights led in 2009 to an order for reparations to all the families and a condemnation of the Mexican justice system. That small victory cemented Doretti's resolve to probe deeper. She now knew that dozens of other bodies had no possible matches to local families. Where had these other victims come from?

Doretti, a stylish woman in her 50s, has spent her life supporting human rights. She studied anthropology in Buenos Aires, during the height of Argentina's "Dirty War," when the right-wing regime kidnapped, tortured and murdered some 20,000 students, activists, journalists and guerrillas. Her team's work identifying remains of the Desaparecidosthe disappeared onescontinues today, and evidence she personally collected in the 1980s is still making its way through the country's legal system. In 2007 the MacArthur Foundation awarded her a "genius grant" for her work investigating human rights abuses around the world, and she serves as a Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the United Nations Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture.

Doretti suspected that some of the unidentified bodies in Mexico may have been migrants journeying north from Central America, and in 2009 she established the Missing Migrants project. The full scope of the problem is hard to pin down, but some 200 migrants die of exposure each summer in southern Arizona alone. Mexico's criminal gangs have kidnapped many more for extortion or murdered and buried these victims in mass graves. Doretti has created a network of forensic DNA banks in El Salvador, Honduras and Chiapas, Mexico and recently announced her first positive identifications from remains recovered in Texas and Arizona. "It's amazing what she's doing," says Bruce Anderson, forensic anthropologist with the medical examiner's office in Pima County, Arizona.

Scientific American met Doretti at her organization's spartan one-room office in Brooklyn's DUMBO neighborhood. Edited excerpts follow.

When the Argentinean dictatorship collapsed in 1982, you still thought that you might follow an academic anthropology path. How did you get introduced to forensics? I was at a demonstration against the International Monetary Fund in January 1984, and one of my friends came and said: "There's a gringo who wants to exhume disappeared people." As it happened, the American Association for the Advancement of Science had sent a scientist named Clyde Snow down to train people in forensics, but the Argentinean Anthropology Association initially did not want to get involved directly. Snow didn't have anybody to work with. Frankly, it sounded very strange to me. But after meeting him the next day, I realized everything he was saying made total senseto apply the techniques of traditional archaeology and biological anthropology into the forensic field so that we will be able to recover and identify the remains of Los Desaparecidos in the proper way.

Read the original:
Forensic Anthropologist Uses DNA to Solve Real-Life Murder Mysteries in Latin America

ReportsnReports.com adds new market research report Top Ten Companies in DNA Sequencing to its store. Global sequencing products market is forecast to reach $6.6 billion by 2016.

Dallas, Texas (PRWEB) October 08, 2012

The goal of this report is to provide a more in-depth look at the top tier DNA sequencing companies as well as some of the second tier companies to look for in the near future, and to note the technological changes within the DNA sequencing industry that are sure to play a role in the years to come.

More specifically, the objectives include identifying companies that are considered the leaders in their field and the technological means these companies are using to exploit their markets and dominate their field.

Key technology points explored include:

Other major factors used to determine top companies in the field include:

INTENDED AUDIENCE

This study will be of particular interest to life-science research tools suppliers, pharmaceutical, diagnostics, nanotechnology, bioinformatics, semiconductor, and biotechnology companies. It will also be valuable to companies involved in genome sequencing projects, sequencing centers, manufacturers of microarrays, suppliers of molecular diagnostics assays, bioinformatics companies, and cancer researchers and clinicians. As this report is a profiling of top companies in the DNA sequencing field, the main audience should also include executive management personnel and marketing and financial analysts.

SCOPE

The scope of this report is focused on a select 10 companies in DNA sequencing, and the key areas in the field that are driving industry growth allowing these companies to succeed. These areas include Sanger, next-generation, and emerging sequencing technologies; the markets for sample preparation products, sequencing instruments and consumables; and bioinformatics and sequencing services. A key area BCC also explores is industry structure, noting strategic alliances and acquisitions along with pertinent patent information.

Original post:
DNA Sequencing Market Growth Driven by Top 10 Companies and Technologies