Where is my Father?: one laboratory’s quest to perfect DNA identification

When INTERPOL, whose membership comprises 190 international police forces,  was looking for a world leader in DNA identification to help any country, anywhere, at any time, with Disaster Victim Identification, such as in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami, who did they call? When  forensic experts in the United States needed urgent advice after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina about using DNA to identify the victims, whom did they ask for advice? And when scientists and governments from countries like the UK, Germany, Russia, Norway and Iraq want advice and assistance on improving their DNA identification skills, identifying victims of terrorist attacks and natural disasters, as well as finding and identifying missing persons, where do they go?

The answer is to a small international organization based in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, set up by President Clinton in 1996 to identify the missing of the Bosnian wars. Fifteen years on, the organization is now a world leader, and its British, American, Canadian, Australian, French and Bosnian scientists run the world’s largest high-throughput DNA identification laboratory system, that has made more than four times the number of DNA-assisted identifications since 2001 than most other laboratory systems on earth put together.

The International Commission on Missing Persons, or ICMP, is run by an American and a Scot: in the words of Professor Niels Morling from Copenhagen, President of The International Society for Forensic Genetics, “their work with DNA is, without doubt, the single most important achievement within the field of human identification with DNA.”

 ‘Where is my Father? : one laboratory’s quest to  perfect DNA identification,’ is the inside, untold story of how ICMP’s DNA laboratory, through its efforts to identify thousands of missing persons worldwide, strove to perfect the science of DNA identification. The book takes the reader along an international detective trail from disaster sites, mass-graves, crashed aircraft and deserted battlefields, via autopsies and mortuaries, to the DNA identification laboratory itself.  This is real-life CSI in action.

Book Author

Christian Jennings is a British freelance foreign correspondent and the author of four works of non-fiction published in the UK, the US, Holland and Italy. Since 1988, across twenty-three countries, he has been writing books and journalism on international current affairs and travel, Special Forces, intelligence and latterly science for publications ranging fromThe Economist and Reuters to Wired , The Daily Telegraph  and The Scotsman. He has been based variously in Kigali, Pristina, Skopje, Nairobi, Geneva and Bujumbura, and now lives in Sarajevo, where from 2008-2010 he took a...
more about Christian Jennings...

Book Reviews

Sorry, no book reviews are available.