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December 2nd, 2008

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Piecing together the DNA puzzle

A revered scientist who can take the worst, Vaněk's work is murder

By Hilda Hoy
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
May 23rd, 2007 issue

Jan Přerovský/THE PRAGUE POST

Daniel Vaněk's full-time job is helping police and historians to identify remains. But his most rewarding work has been resolving one of the Balkan wars' worst genocides.

COURTESY PHOTO

The positive ID of massacre victims in Bosnia and Herzegovina helped bring closure to surviving families. enlarge

Daniel Vaněk, one of the Czech Republic’s top experts in forensic genetics, is most at home in his lab, and thinks nothing of staying there for up to 18 hours a day to labor over his research.

But the most fulfilling work of his career was not in this familiar setting but in the volatile Balkan region, just a handful of years after Yugoslavia shocked the world by violently coming apart at the seams.

In late 2001, Vaněk was invited to join an international team of experts picking apart the aftermath of the Balkan wars. With tens of thousands missing by the end of the 1990s, many of them believed to be victims of war crimes and ethnic cleansing, an unprecedented investigation loomed.

Vaněk, 41, was asked to use his DNA expertise to help identify remains uncovered throughout the former Yugoslavia. In the end, he spent 30 months in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 2002 to 2004, bringing closure to countless families and aiding in the prosecution of suspected war criminals.

For Vaněk, the project was rewarding for reasons both professional and personal.

The chance to take part in what he calls “the biggest DNA identification project in history” was irresistible, he says. But there were other draws too.

“I felt the importance of our mission,” he says. “I wanted to help people who were missing somebody, to bring back their loved ones. When you ID the body, the story is finally over for the family. They can put flowers on a grave.”

In February 2002, he arrived in Sarajevo to join the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), an agency founded in 1996 to address the issue of the thousands missing throughout the Balkans. Currently, the commission is also helping identify victims of the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia.

Touring mass graves filled with victims of war, some of them children, would test even the most steely of emotions. Vaněk is resolutely a man of scientific objectivity — most of the time.

But when it comes to unearthing children, he says, “From a scientific point of view, it is just a smaller body. But … it’s pointless to kill a 6-year-old. Just seeing that waste of life …” He trails off.

A precise science

With piercing blue eyes, a salt-and-pepper brush cut and an exceptionally firm handshake, Vaněk cuts an imposing, authoritative figure. The exactness of forensic genetics suits him.

“You’re dealing with something very sensitive,” he says. “If you make a mistake, nobody will forgive you.”

After a brief period in Sarajevo, he relocated to Banja Luka, a town in an area of Bosnia and Herzegovina known as Republika Srpska. Here, ethnic Serbians greatly outnumber Bosnians, an ethnic group that’s predominately Muslim. Here was also the site of some of the most horrifying warfare in the 1990s, including ethnic cleansing in and around the town of Srebrenica, where an estimated 8,000 Bosnian men and boys were systematically executed in July 1995.

Skirting leftover land mines in Republika Srpska didn’t faze Vaněk, nor did dealing with frequent power outages and poor infrastructure.

“It was like living in Czechoslovakia under the communist regime,” he jokes. And, unlike his North American colleagues, he easily picked up Serbian, which helped him work with local staff and negotiate with regional authorities.

The identification work itself was painstaking and slow.

First, forensic anthropologists and archaeologists excavated the mass graves — “It’s a crime scene, so you have to document everything,” Vaněk says — before he and his team received samples of the remains, either a piece of bone or tooth.

In the not-so-distant past, scientists could only extract a DNA profile from certain body fluids, such as saliva, blood or semen. As the technology improved, DNA could be obtained from less and less: first a hair with the root still attached, then a hair without the root. Eventually, a complete DNA profile will be easily obtainable from as little as a single fingerprint, Vaněk says confidently.

Today, top scientists like him regularly isolate DNA from bones, even bones that have been buried for tens, hundreds or thousands of years. If they’re less than a decade old, as in the Balkans, the extraction can be completed in less than a week.

Throughout the process, samples were identified using only barcodes — no names, no ethnicities — to prevent anyone’s biases from getting in the way.

Vaněk sternly prevented himself from taking sides.

“What I learned is that all parties involved in that war were guilty. It wasn’t just Serbians or Muslims,” he says. “Everyone’s talking about Srebrenica, but there was another case where Muslims did the same to a Serb village. It was everybody against everybody.”

The hours in Banja Luka were long and the work stressful. To blow off steam, on weekends Vaněk would drive back to the Czech Republic or to Croatia’s Dalmatian Coast, where idyllic beaches help put aside the war wounds of the recent past.

The drive for answers

DNA technology enables organizations such as the ICMP, a key missing persons’ agency, to solve the mysteries in an unprecedented way, he says.

“Before, they were using so-called traditional methods: anthropology, dental records, witness testimony. … DNA was the only way to move forward in a fast and reliable way.”

As of this May, researchers have successfully extracted DNA from more than 21,000 samples of bone, according to the ICMP. The commission takes blood samples from living relatives and compares those DNA profiles with those from excavated bones in a database. A positive hit means the blood sample and the bone came from the same family.

Using these methods, a total of 11,600 individuals have been positively identified, according to the ICMP.

But a further 17,500 people are still missing and unaccounted for. The vast majority of those individuals — 13,000 — were from the Bosnia and Herzegovina region.

The drive to find answers is what led Vaněk to a career in science.

His father was a lawyer, and his grandfather a police chief. Vaněk also longed for a career bringing crimes and mysteries to a clean end. After high school, he studied at Charles University in Prague, first obtaining a degree in microbiology, then earning his doctorate in forensic genetics.

Before heading to the Balkans, he spent 10 years at the Czech Police Institute of Criminalistics, where he headed the DNA laboratory and the national DNA database.

These days, Vaněk is as dedicated as ever to forensics issues in his native country. He’s director of his own company, Forensic DNA Services, and also president of the Czechoslovak Society for Forensic Genetics, where he’s lobbying for tighter regulation of the DNA labs in this country.

The Czech Republic lacks proper laws safeguarding whose DNA can be stored in police databases, he says, and for how long.

“It’s violating data protection issues,” Vaněk says.

Improving education and awareness regarding forensics issues is also a priority. The so-called CSI effect — myths and untruths about forensics spread by the popular crime show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation — is spreading misinformation about the limits and abilities of criminal forensics among prosecutors and judges, he says.

He also aids in investigations overseas. Later this year, he’ll receive bone samples from a mass grave uncovered in the U.S. state of New Hampshire. Investigators believe the grave contains remains of slaves shipped over from Africa. Vaněk hopes to be able to confirm that theory.

Hilda Hoy can be reached at hhoy@praguepost.com

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