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A lab that handles tens of thousands of dollars worth of DNA testing in police investigations plans to soon stop accepting out-of-state samples, a move that officials say poses a problem for Arkansas and could add hefty new fees for local law enforcement agencies.
The Center for Human Identification at the University of North Texas Health Science Center lost the roughly $2 million it received in federal funds to run the program, said professor and lab director Bruce Budowle. Instead, the National Institute of Justice will use that money to test backlogged sexual assault kits, he said.
Scientists around the country have petitioned for the money to be reinstated before the federal fiscal year starts over in October, Budowle said. But if they’re unsuccessful, the funding drops to zero.
The looming cut is problematic for Arkansas, which doesn't have the facilities to conduct the mitochondrial DNA testing the Texas lab specializes in. That testing is more expensive but has a higher success rate, especially for eroded, old or tiny samples of bone and tissue, experts say.
If nothing changes, Arkansas will have to ask local law enforcement agencies to shell out thousands for testing previously done for free. That financial burden means cases will pile up, experts say, and loved ones of the unidentified dead and missing will have to wait longer for answers.
NOT SOMETHING YOU CAN DO FOR PENNIESThe state Crime Lab conducts nuclear DNA testing at its Little Rock location, executive director Kermit B.Channell II said. A nuclear DNA test is generally less expensive, he said, and there’s some crossover between what nuclear and mitochondrial DNA can tell scientists. But for years, Arkansas relied on both methods to draw the clearest genetic picture possible.
Both unidentified human remains — bones, skeletons and decomposed bodies — as well as missing persons cases are sent to the state to be studied, said Chris Edwards, who has overseen those cases at the Crime Lab for the past decade.
For human remains, technicians try to use dental records or other details, like scraps of clothing, to make an identification, Edwards said. If those methods prove unsuccessful, anthropologists can try to determine the ethnicity, sex and stature of the individual. Then, DNA samples are sent to the north Texas center for testing.
For missing persons cases, Edwards goes through local law enforcement agencies to contact relatives so they can submit cheek swabs to create a “family reference sample.” With those samples, the lab can compile a genetic profile of the missing person. Those cases are tested for nuclear DNA, and the majority are sent off for mitochondrial testing, Channell said.
Once the tests are finished, the DNA results are put into an FBI database: the Combined DNA Index System. The system searches missing people and human remains cases for possible matches. Other information is uploaded into NamUS, a repository used by professionals and the public to track down potential matches.
Analyzing nuclear DNA costs the lab about $300 per sample, Channell said. So a “typical” missing persons case — which includes testing two relatives’ saliva and an unidentified bone or tooth — runs around $900, he said.
For mitochondrial testing, the costs increase, largely because the equipment, labor and process involved are complicated. Channell estimated that an average case runs about $1,500.
UNT's Budowle estimated that it costs about $2,000, while noting that some samples can cost up to five times that amount since mitochondrial DNA testing is fickle. One scratch on a bone might yield no results while another 1 millimeter away could proffer a full genetic profile, he said. Retesting a sample can shoot costs up to $10,000 per case, he said.
“It’s not something you can do for pennies,” Budowle said, adding that the UNT center operates at cost.
From 2012 to 2016, Arkansas’ Crime Lab assessed about 79 either missing or unidentified persons cases, according to lab records. It has sent 29 of those, about six a year, to Texas for mitochondrial testing.
When Channell became director in 2007, he noticed the lab housed a backlog of unidentified human remains stretching back to 1970, he said. Under his tenure, dozens of those samples have also been sent to the UNT center.
Now, without the free testing, Arkansas must find a substitute. Since the state lab doesn’t have the resources to do mitochondrial testing, new DNA samples will be sent to private companies that specialize in genetic testing, and local law enforcement agencies will be asked to pay for it, Channell said. THE MORE DATA THE BETTERNuclear DNA is the DNA frequently taught in high school biology class: A cell’s nucleus stores strands of genetic code from both parents. So a nuclear DNA test can tell experts if a bit of bone or blood comes from the offspring of a certain man or woman, Channell said.
However, mitochondrial DNA is found, unsurprisingly, in the mitochondria — the powerhouse of the cell. It’s “maternally linked,” meaning that DNA comes from just the mother, not the father.
Because of this, mitochondrial DNA can be traced further back on the family tree than nuclear DNA, spanning up to four generations through the mother’s lineage, Budowle said. So with mitochondrial DNA, a missing person’s distant relative on their mother’s side, like a grandparent or cousin, could give a family reference sample. Nuclear DNA testing requires parents or siblings, who might be unavailable.
Plus, mitochondrial DNA is more “plentiful,” Channell said. A single cell contains one nucleus but between 500 to 1,000 mitochondria, which means there’s “500 to a thousand times as much DNA to work with,” Budowle said.
And more DNA means a higher chance of success. Budowle estimated that his lab gets a good genetic result about 90 percent of the time through mitochondrial testing. For nuclear testing, that percentage is “much lower,” he said, especially for degraded or tiny pieces of flesh or bone that are trickier to work with than a fresh blood sample.
Mitochondrial DNA does not say more about a person than nuclear DNA, Chanell said. Rather, the methods offer different data, and the combination “provides for very good, accurate scientific verification,” he said. While there’s some overlap in the information gathered, without both processes, “things could be missed,” he said.
“We’re scientists. We like data, right? The more data, the happier we are,” Channell said. IT WOULD BE A HARDSHIPMost people who go missing in Little Rock turn up within a few days or weeks, police department detective Jake Pasman said. For those who don’t and in cases of suspected “foul play,” Pasman coordinates with the state Crime Lab to obtain family reference samples for that missing person. He’s done this for nearly 20 cases in the past two years, Pasman estimated. So far, there haven’t been any “hits.”
Pasman said DNA samples that Little Rock police collect will always be sent off to the Crime Lab. As for additional mitochondrial testing, “We’ll have to figure it out from there,” he said, noting that budgeting decisions are not his purview.
The detective said that high costs could be a problem, though likely a more substantial one for smaller Arkansas agencies that are “working off micro budgets.” “It’s that 1 percent that you have out of all those missing persons cases that, you know, you need to go that extra mile,” Pasman said. “And if you have enough 1 percents in there, especially [as] a smaller agency, they can break you if they’re charging $10,000 a pop.”
Police in Farmington, population 6,477, are hoping mitochondrial DNA will identify a person whose remains were recovered in mid-December of last year. A car struck a natural-gas line near Main Street and Double Springs Road, triggering an explosion and a fire that roared “like a jet engine,” Capt. Mike Wilbanks said.
The blaze burned for more than eight hours. Wilbanks watched from 100 yards away and had to yell to the officials standing next to him.
When authorities approached the scene, the identifying numbers on the vehicle had been warped. As for the driver, there was minor evidence to collect, Wilbanks said. Just a few pounds of dried bone particles were sent through the Crime Lab to the north Texas center for mitochondrial testing, he said. Farmington police have yet to hear back about a possible identification.
When told the same test could cost a few thousand dollars in the future, Wilbanks said that would “put quite a constraint on a small town department like ours.” To make the finances work, the agency would have to forgo some training expenses or an equipment upgrade, he said.
“It would be a hardship on the agency. It goes without saying,” Wilbanks said.
“But we’d have to find a way. We wouldn’t let a family member go without knowing something for a matter of a few thousand dollars.” NOT JUST AN ARKANSAS ISSUEIn 1995, mitochondrial DNA identified the remains of an Arkansas Navy pilot whose plane was shot down over North Vietnam nearly three decades before, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported.
Military officials in Hawaii matched Lt. Cmdr. John Frederick Barr’s bone marrow to his sister and mother’s samples, making him the first Vietnam MIA case from Arkansas to be identified through the mitochondrial method. His remains were buried with full military honors 28 years to the day after his plane crashed.
“We didn’t have closure,” Barr’s sister, Lynda Barr Langford of Little Rock, said in the Sep. 7, 1995, article.
Four years later, the Crime Lab received a $250,000 federal grant to buy chemicals and equipment to do mitochondrial testing itself. The program shuttered in 2003 when the funds ran out, according to the newspaper.
Since 2007, the Crime Lab has logged 146 unidentified human remains cases. Thirty-eight of those people have been identified either through dental records, fingerprints or DNA, Edwards said. In the same time frame, the lab has handled 377 missing persons cases, of which 186, or about half, have been located either deceased or alive.
For the past decade or so, mitochondrial DNA testing helped the state Crime Lab in its mission to identify the missing and unidentified dead as well as bring peace to those people’s families, Channell said. The center in Texas has helped that mission not only for Arkansas but also for labs around the country, he said.
The Texas center handles around half of these sorts of missing persons and unidentified human remains cases for the United States, and the majority of its work, around 70 percent, comes from states outside Texas, Budowle said.
The system has more than 8,000 family reference samples, 6,000 fragments of unidentified human remains and about 300 direct samples from missing people. Among those groups, there’s been around 2,200 matches, a rate Budowle described as “quite powerful.”
If out-of-state samples are excluded, that pool doesn’t grow, which means the chance of a match drops significantly, Budowle said, and undoubtedly, fewer people will be identified.
The director said he does not fault the National Institute of Justice for wanting to test sexual assault kits. It’s an important issue, he said, and the agency is “doing the best they can” to balance the funding it's allocated.
Still, the missing and unknown dead need a voice, Budowle said.
“They’re silent. They don’t get the sensationalism of a building blowing up or a plane crashing,” he said.
Right now, the professor is planning for the worst. The lab can take in about 300 more family reference samples and 80 more unidentified human remains from outside states before money runs out, he said in mid-April.
“I am hopeful. I am very hopeful. But obviously, I have to be pragmatic,” Budowle said.
When Channell learned of the potential funding cut, he wrote a letter to then National Institute of Justice Director Nancy Rodriguez and urged her department to reconsider. The Texas center has “helped families in Arkansas and across the country identify their missing loved ones,” he wrote.
“Without this service, these families would have no hope.” |
