HANOI, VIETNAM—The government of Vietnam will upgrade three DNA testing centers, and a private company will assist with the identification of the remains of Vietnam War victims. “The technical challenges are considerable but tractable,” Wolfgang Höppner, chief executive of medical-diagnostics company Bioglobe, told Nature News. Those challenges include Vietnam’s climate and soil microbes that can contribute to the degradation of DNA, and the large numbers of remains to be identified. The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), located in Sarajevo, will help train Vietnamese scientists to exhume remains from mass graves and recognize identifying characteristics in the skeletons. Reference DNA will also be collected from family members to be compared with DNA recovered from victims, many of whom died without children, and whose parents have probably passed away in the 40 years since the Vietnam War. “That is why it is particularly important to do the DNA analysis with a larger than normal set of markers,” Höppner explained. The program is expected to identify between 8,000 and 10,000 sets of remains a year. To read more about archaeology in the area, go to "Settling Southeast Asia."
