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| | I hate Howard Cash! He is a fucking liar and a thief | | | Thursday, November 20, 2008 (3:48 PM)
(I'm feeling enraged) | | UA genomics lab tackles Holocaust puzzle
UA genomics lab tackles Holocaust puzzle
By Tom Beal
ARIZONA DAILY STAR
Genetic technology developed to identify the remains of those killed in the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, will be enhanced in a University of Arizona genomics laboratory to solve a more complex puzzle — identification of families separated for generations after the Holocaust.
In addition to possibly reuniting families, the DNA Shoah Project will collect a database that will aid identification of remains yet to be discovered and will develop forensic tools for use in other acts of genocide.
The project, an effort of the UA's Human Origins Genotyping Laboratory, is also creating an educational component that will allow the story of the Holocaust to be taught in scientific curricula.
It's not possible today to match relatives three generations apart, but that doesn't deter UA researchers, who say they'll solve that puzzle once the data are collected.
In the meantime, the DNA Shoah Project is racing to spread the word to Holocaust survivors, whose numbers dwindle by the day.
Tucson survivor Bill Kugelman, 83, said he intends to give a simple oral swab sample of his DNA to the project, though he expects no benefit from it. Kugelman, a survivor of three Nazi concentration camps, lost most of the European branch of his family in the Holocaust.
"All of the family I have, I have," said Kugelman. "Whoever is gone, is gone."
Matches of living relatives are a long shot, said Matt Kaplan, research director for the DNA Shoah Project, but he's confident some will be made and says the project will have many other benefits.
In addition, it represents an intriguing scientific puzzle for Kaplan and the lab he runs in the University of Arizona's Bio5 Institute.
He calls the technology developed for remains-testing at Ground Zero "high quality work" but also says "it was easy. It matched you to you. We're trying to do this for the Holocaust — 6,000 people a day killed, 9 million overall."
In addition to the numbers, the passage of time makes the task more difficult.
"Your DNA is a shuffled deck of cards you get from your mom and your dad."
With each succeeding generation, that shuffling makes identification of similarities more difficult.
Most of our DNA is identical, said Kaplan. "That's what makes a wildebeest a wildebeest. Or a human being a human being."
What the computers are looking for are those random mutations that not only identify "you as you," but you as the son or daughter of your particular parents. That gets tougher with each successive generation because you're losing half of the original material each time your DNA deck is shuffled.
"The more markers we can identify, the deeper in time we're going to be able to go back," said Kaplan.
Kaplan says he'll need a fairly large group of DNA, at least 10,000 samples, to begin looking for markers and matches.
He can't do that today, but he's getting close, Kaplan said. "Most of the things I do today were impossible three or four years ago."
It's made simpler by the infrastructure built by Arizona Research Labs at the UA's Bio5 Institute, where the Human Origins Genotyping Laboratory installed the technology to handle large-scale genotyping after it signed on to do the sampling from 260,000 people who have so far participated in the Genographics Project, run by IBM and National Geographic.
"In 2000, we did 300 samples," said Kaplan. "Now it's 1,500 to 4,000 a day."
His lab and his collaborators at the Genomic Analysis and Technology Core and the Biotechnology Computing Facility, now offer large-scale DNA testing for the entire UA campus, in addition to the outside projects.
The first step for the DNA Shoah Project is not testing, but collecting samples. Holocaust survivors, the first target of the campaign, are dying.
"It's a numbers game," said Lynn Davis, information specialist for the project. "We need to get around the world and build the biggest database we can to make it possible."
Right now, the DNA Shoah Project has fewer than 1,000 participants. Its outreach is going first to Jewish congregations and Holocaust survivors groups.
Next, said Syd Mandelbaum, the project's founder, they'll concentrate on second- and third-generation descendants of those orphaned, killed or displaced.
Mandelbaum, who now runs a nonprofit organization to feed the hungry in New York, was a geneticist earlier in his career. He is also the son of two Holocaust survivors, who always wondered if some members of the families they thought were wiped out might have been displaced and are still living somewhere in the world.
He began searching for a scientific way to answer his parents' questions after reading accounts of a mass grave that had been disturbed in the excavation for an airport expansion in Stuttgart, Germany.
He discovered there was no genetic database for comparing those remains.
A former colleague directed him to Kaplan's boss, UA geneticist Michael Hammer. He visited and was impressed with the UA's setup.
Then, Mandelbaum had a call from another former colleague, James Watson, whose theoretical work with Francis Crick on the structure of DNA led to a Nobel Prize in 1953.
Watson directed him to Howard Cash, of Gene Code Forensics, who had developed the genetic matching system that identified Ground Zero victims during the excavation of the World Trade Center in Manhattan.
Cash became a part of the project and donated his company's software to it.
For Kugelman, the Tucson Holocaust survivor, the odds of anyone finding lost family seem high but not impossible.
"Who says no? You don't know. You never know. My extended family in Poland was more than 100 people. After the war there was a handful left, except for the family we had in America."
He is also certain there are mass graves yet to be discovered. He was forced to dig graves in a camp near Dachau in Bavarian Germany during the war — the camp where his brother perished.
Kugelman began speaking out about his experiences long after the war. "It took me about 30 years to open my mouth. For 30 years, you try to erase from your memory the horrible things."
To Mandelbaum, the genetic history he is helping to record is part of that total history that should never be forgotten. "It's another way to to keep the memory alive."
He thinks the project's potential impact on the young is the most important part of it.
"They read 'The Diary of Anne Frank' right now, but how about a DNA lesson in a science class to talk about the Holocaust?"
Davis said the project has already developed the first module of a curriculum that will harness the current interest in forensic science to interest students in both science and the history of the Holocaust.
? Contact reporter Tom Beal at 573-4158 or tbeal@azstarnet.com
All content copyright © 1999-2008 AzStarNet, Arizona Daily Star and its wire services and suppliers and may not be republished without permission. All rights reserved. Any copying, redistribution, or retransmission of any of the contents of this service without the expressed written consent of Arizona Daily Star or AzStarNet is prohibited.
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| | 911 Embezzlement Scandal Trail | | | | Friday, August 22, 2008 (9:14 PM) | | D Venkata Satyanarayana Raju
For example, the agency paid $166,000 to HS Group and Infotech, which bid on and won contracts with the medical examiner. Baseline could not track down contact information for either company, both of which are alleged to have been operated by the informant and performed no services, according to the complaint. However, at Venkataram's direction, the companies issued checks to A&D Marketing and Trade A2Z, another alleged shell company operated by Venkataram and Abreu. The complaint states that Rosa Abreu admitted to Zander in an August 2005 interview that A&D, Trade A2Z and a third company, Infodata, were shell companies.
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Expert Supports Search Methods for 911 Remains at Bank Building
The evidence I believe we have is the fact that the people turned into dust.
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"Some family members — many of whom never received even the smallest physical trace of their relatives — have said the search is inadequate, citing the use earlier this year of shovels and rakes that could not possibly find the smaller remains."
"Dr. Charles S. Hirsch, the city’s chief medical examiner, had no comment on the report yesterday, said his spokeswoman, Ellen Borakove. “The quality of our work speaks for itself,” she said."
(see Hirsch articles from NY TIMES: here: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/ti...rsch/index.html )
Who is Professor Gould is the director of Forensic Archaeology Recovery?
oh.
"By noon, the mayor had set up shop in the Police Academy, on East 20th Street. He asked Dr. Hirsch, the medical examiner, about survivors. “Most of the bodies will be vaporized,” Dr. Hirsch replied, Mr. Giuliani recounts in “Leadership...."
Gene Codes Corporation is a privately-owned international firm specializing in bioinformatics software for DNA sequence analysis. Based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Gene Codes conducts business in over 40 countries world wide. Its flagship software product, Sequencher, is widely used by researchers at academic and government labs as well as biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies for DNA sequence assembly [1]. In addition to its commercial business, Gene Codes dedicates an large portion of its talents to humanitarian efforts. Gene Codes developed the software that was used for DNA identification of most of the victims of the 2001 World Trade Center attack. [2]. Additional information about forensic software developed by Gene Codes can be found here [3]
[edit] History
Gene Codes Corporation was founded in 1988 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In 1991, the DNA sequence assembly and analysis software, Sequencher, was released. In the following years, Sequencher has established a very wide customer base across academic, government, and pharmaceutical laboratories. The latest version, Sequencher 4.8 was released in October 2007.
In the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, Gene Codes dedicated much of their resources to the identification of the victims. This effort resulted in the Mass Fatality Identification SYStem, MFISYS (pronounced “emphasis”). This software records DNA profiles and finds matches in specimen sample profiles. These profiles are generated by sequencing a series of genetic markers including mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), short tandem repeats (STRs) and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). This system was also used to identify those killed in the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake.
Gene Codes is currently working with the DNA Shoah Project whose aim is to identify remains of those killed during the holocaust.[4]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Codes_Corporation
Dr. Death
Several members of New York’s Congressional delegation said they did not think Dr. Hirsch should have the power to decide whether deaths were linked to 9/11. This month, they urged Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to create a panel of independent medical experts. But the mayor rejected the proposal, saying such decisions should be based on science, not politics.
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Forensic Archaeology Recovery
formed as a direct response to the World Trade Center (WTC) disaster in New York City, September 11, 2001
ledzik, Paul S. and William C. Rodrigues III. "Damnum Fatale: The Taphonomic
Fate of Human Remains." In Advances in Forensic Taphonomy, edited by William
D. Haglund and Marcella H. Sorg, CRC Press, 2001, pp. 321-330.Damnum Fatale: The Taphonomic Fate of Humain RemainsDr. Death [I] | | | | 80 Views | 0 Thumbs Up | 0 Comments | |
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| | Natarajan R Venkataram: Criminal: Where is the media>? | | | Friday, August 22, 2008 (9:01 PM)
(I'm feeling aggravated) | | An Indian-origin former high-ranking officer has been sentenced to 15 years in prison by a court in New York for siphoning off government money to the tune of $9 million, most of which was intended to help identify victims of 9/11 terror attacks, and stashing it away in India.
Natarajan R Venkataram, 43, was also ordered to pay $2.97 million in restitution and forfeiture by Manhattan federal court's District Judge Robert P Patterson.
A tearful Venkataram apologised before he was sentenced saying he was "ashamed" to have "terribly failed everyone with my wrong decisions. "I will regret this great loss for the rest of my life," he said.
Venkataram, who was arrested in 2005 for doling out lucrative contracts to shell computer companies, including some from India, had in October last year pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy, one count of embezzlement and misapplication of funds and fourteen counts of money laundering, according to court documents.
Venkataram served as a director of New York's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for 13 years.
Between 1999 and 2005, Venkataraman steered more than $13 million in contracts and purchase orders to fictitious companies with the help of co-accused Rosa Abreu, 42, Director of Records at the Office of the Chief Medical Officer (OCME).
The scam had started before the World Trade Tower attacks in 2001 but intensified after OCME developed an acute need for computer services following the September 11 tragedy, when the department was assigned the task of identifying victims through the forensic analysis of body parts and other evidence collected at Ground Zero.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?sectionName=&id=fc9f93c0-334f-4dc4-ade3-bfa2a80cad54&&Headline=NRI+gets+15+years+in+jail+for+embezzling+9%2f11+funds&strParent=strParentID
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