Researchers are working to develop environmental DNA into a forensic tool to help find the remains of long-missing service members at sea. LongReads
For 3 weeks in June 1944, bombs rained down on the tiny, lush island of Saipan, then an important Japanese stronghold in the western Pacific Ocean. As part of its World War II campaign, the United States had mounted an assault by sea and air. Amid flaming palm trees and churning seas, a sturdy U.S. Hellcat fighter plane and its lone pilot went down in a harbor west of the island. His body was never found.
The work of Mires, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and Kovacs, of Marine Imaging Technologies, is part of a new collaboration between the U.S. military and outside scientists to apply the tools of research science to help bring missing service members home. More than 81,500 U.S. service members are considered missing in action ; their remains lie buried in untold locations worldwide or are interred as unknowns in military cemeteries .
“We are a force multiplier,” says Charles Konsitzke, leader of the University of Wisconsin , Madison’s MIA Recovery and Identification Project, which is part of the eDNA project. He and his team are among dozens of scientists and specialists from outside the U.S. government who have teamed up with an arm of the Department of Defense called the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency to find service members still missing from past wars.
UW researchers, who work on Wisconsin-based cases independently in addition to partnering with DPAA, took up Charles Krueger’s case in 2020. His family welcomed the input: Before then, they had only his 1946 casualty file, which the UW team later found conflicted with other historical documents. “There’s a lot of uncertainty with DPAA, and often you get radio silence,” John Krueger says.
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