DNA, a major triumph in historical research
Annik BIANCHINI, France
Genetic fingerprints are revolutionizing history. Tests can now be carried
out on biochemical matter several thousand years old, making it possible to define genetic
information specific to each individual.
It is not the first time that, at the request of historians, scientists have
made their contribution to the quest for truth, but, until now, genetics has not
contributed to re-writing history. Today, this has been achieved. After two centuries of
mystery, one of the most disconcerting enigmas in French history has been solved thanks to
DNA, that small, almost indestructible, chemical molecule. Genetic tests have confirmed
that the child who died in the Temple prison in Paris on June 12. 1795, was indeed the son
of Louis XVI of the Bourbon dynasty and Marie-Antoniette who had been guillotined two
years earlier during the revolution. It was Louis XVII in person, and not another child
who had been substituted for him as is asserted in royalist circles, a hypothesis
according to which little Louis-Charles would have escaped from the Temple prison and the
heart, preserved as a relic, would have been that of another child who died in his stead.
During the autopsy, taking advantage of a moment of inattention on the part
of his colleagues, one of the forensic doctors took the heart away while the rest of the
corpse ended up in the common grave. It was kept in a jar of alcohol, stolen, than
restored, rolled in dust, passed from hand to hand for two hundred years and, finally, in
1975, handed over to the duke de Bufferemont, the leader of the French legitimists, who
laid it in a crypt in the basilica of Saint-Denis near Paris. Today, the heart is as dark
as a rock but could it still contain some nitochondrial DNA-tiny cell organelles mainly
transmitted by the mother. The biologists in charge of the tests had some doubts. After
sawing it, four fragments were taken, two from the tip of the heart muscle and two from
the aorta. They were compared with some of Marie-Antoniette’ hair, found in a
medallion. For greater reliability, the same hair was compared with the DNA of her direct
descendants. Anne of Romania and her brother Andre de Bourbon Parme. The test proved
doubly positive. The heart, the hair and the direct descendants all belong to the same
family. Louis XVII and the prisoner in the Temple were one and the same person.
What exactly is DNA? It is deoxyribonucleic acid, the vector of heredity. It
can be identified from blood, hair, saliva, sperm, bone or any other cell. In its nucleus,
each cell contains the whole of a person’s genetic information. Present day
techniques make it possible to isolate fragments of DNA, from an infinitesimal amount of
biological matter, and to duplicate the elements until enough material is obtained to
carry out a test. The increased elements are then separated according to size and image,
called genetic fingerprint, is then depicted. DNA is so resistant that it is found in a
practically normal state on samples thousands of years old. The test is simple, reliable
and inexpensive.
In France, several laboratories use identification by genetic fingerprints.
In Evry, near Paris, the team of Jean Weissenbach, the director of Genescope, is involved
in measuring, mapping and deciphering the genetic heritage. The laboratory is in the
forefront of molecular biology and genetic sequencing. Its ambition is to put France in
competition with the major world powers, especially the United States.
Thanks to these tests, whole segments of history can be re-examined. Thus,
the mystery surrounding the Romanovs, the royal family, which reigned over Russia for
three centuries, has been solved. To check that the bones found in a common grave in
Ekaterinburg in the Ural forest really did belong to Nocholas II, the last Russian Tsar,
executed in 1918, a team of scientists compared the DNA taken from his remains with that
of the direct descendants of the royal family. They concluded, with 99.9% certainty that
the bones belonged to Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra. Genetic test has become an
essential instrument of investigations, but it has to be used correctly and more should
not be expected from it that it can provide. First of all, people have to realize that DNA
tests are just a tool among others and that. Alone, they do not provide the whole truth.
The latter comes from clues, deductions and witness accounts from archives. It is not the
direct product of a scientific process however reliable.
Hence the "survivorists" refute to accept that the young dauphin
died in the Temple prison and they refute the results of the DNA test on the remains of
Louis-Charles Capet, who died at the age of 10. According to them, the tests have been
carried out on the remains of Louis-Joseph, Louis XVI’s elder son, who died in 1789
at the age of 8. Consequently, Louis-Joseph Capet’s heart would have been substituted
for his younger brother’s. According to them, the DNA tests simply demonstrated that
the ‘heart of the child who died in the Temple prison on June 8, 1795, is related to
the family of Marie-Antoniette, the presumed mother". So there is nothing to prove
that it was Louis XVII. The historian Philippe Delorme, who had instigated the
investigation, had anticipated this objection. In his book, "Louis XVII, the
truth", he presents the tribulations of the heart of the first dauphin whose trace
was lost in 1817. However, Professor Brinckmann, from Munster University, is formal on one
point: the heart, which he analyzed, had not been embalmed, contrary to royal usage. So it
could not be that of Louis-Joseph who was buried following the rules, but far more likely
that of Louis-Charles whose heart had been stolen by one of the forensic scientists.
But it makes more than that to discourage hundreds of
‘survivorists’ supporting the bourbons. The most famous of them was Wilhelm
Naundorff, a German clockmaker. In spite of a first negative DNA test carried out on an
exhumed bone, his supporters had retorted that it was not the right bone. So, it appears
that proof by genetics is not always enough to put an end to debate.
Ten years of German unity
Hermann Horstkotte, Germany
Berlin (INP): Ten years after German unity, living standards in the western
and eastern parts of the country are far from similar. But much has already been achieved
on the path to equality, even if progress in the new eastern states is shadowed by high
unemployment.
To measure the upswing in eastern Germany to date, one should start from the
hopeless political and economic situation of the former German Democratic Republic, GDR,
before unification in October 1990. The crisis of the GDR’s state planned, or command
economy accelerated the peaceful revolution of the 17 million east Germans and their
striving for freedom along with the 60 million people of the Federal Republic of Germany
in the West. At the end of 1989, the GDR’s Central Planning Commission and finance
ministry realized that Eastern Europe, and especially the GDR economy, faced bankruptcy.
East Germany had a budget deficit equivalent to DM 120 billion and foreign debt more than
US$ 20 billion. But most worrying was that the productivity of East German industry had
fallen by about 50 percent since 1980, and there was no sign of an end to the decline.
The fall of Berlin Wall in November 1989, German unification on October 3,
1990 under Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and the unavoidable introduction of the D Mark to East
Germany strengthened the purchasing power of the east Germans. But it also weakened
dramatically the competitiveness of their economy. Of more than nine million jobs in the
formerGDR, about one-third were lost in a very short time. But more than every second
eastern German worker took part in official retraining programs and changed their
professions or jobs. Retraining is financed by the statutory national unemployment
insurance fund out of a special ‘solidarity’ levy on all Germans on income tax
payable to help finance the reconstruction of the former East Germany.
The reconstruction program, called ‘Aufbau Ost’ (which can be
translated as ‘Building Up the East)0, currently rests on five pillars. Some examples
of major projects in eastern Germany which were financed by the Federal budget in 1999
are:
# Promotion of innovation, research and development, mainly in small to
medium-sized businesses and startup companies:DM 3.2 billion.
# Regional economic promotion: DM 2.6 billion.
# Promotion of infrastructure such as the construction and rehabilitation of
transport routes:; DM 18.9 billion.
# Public sector job-creation measures: DM 13.7 billion.
# GDR ‘legacy’ debts stemming from former state-owned enterprises:
DM 1.6 billion.
In addition, the Federal budget each year contributes supplementary funds
totaling DM 14 billion under Germany’s system of ‘financial adjustment’
among the 16 federal states to compensate the poorer ones. According to Germany’s
basic law, Constitution, the system is an essential means of achieving equality of living
standards throughout Germany. All in all, more than DM 40 billion, or about 8 percent of
the 1999 federal budget, was allocated to the Aufbau Ost program.
The European Union, EU, also is financially supporting structural improvement
in eastern Germany on a long-term basis. Brussels will pay the new eastern German states
Euro 2.85 billion about DM 5.7 billion per year to 2006.
Large parts of eastern Germany’s infrastructure have in the meantime
been renewed. To date. 11,700 km/7,312 miles of motorways and major roads and 5,400
km/3,375 miles of railway track have been modernized and expanded. More than half of the
old flats have been modernized and renovated and 600,000 new flats built. Environmental
degradation, particularly in the sectors of water and waste management and air pollution
has been reduced markedly.
The privatization of almost all state-owned enterprises in the former GDR was
completed speedily in less tan four years. That could hardly have been achieved without
the help of foreign investors, especially in other EU countries and the USA. For instance,
in the eastern German State of Thuringen, in the heart of united Germany, Europe’s
most modern oil refinery arose mainly with French support, but also some Russian
investment. Opel Eisenach, the eastern German production plant of US car and truck
manufacturer General Motors, is a classic example of automation of production processes in
the EU region. And no fewer than two international computer chip manufacturers have set up
production plants in Dresden, the capital of the eastern German state of Saxony.
The restructuring of agriculture in the new states is also well advanced. No
fewer than 32,000 private-sector farms have emerged from the former state-run agriculture
combines or cooperatives of the GDR, and are now working in an exemplary way.
The annual rate of growth of processing industry in eastern Germany in recent
years has averaged almost 10 percent. Export growth is also well at the two-digit
percentage level. But this dynamic development is still driven by too few eastern German
companies and factories. The factories in the new states account for only about 7 percent
of the national processing industry’s value added. Their productivity is on average
two-thirds of the western German level. This means they still suffer from a comparative
disadvantage compared with their position before German unification. But, as Chancellor
Schroder noted in Berlin, that is also great progress. |
