José Pestano, director of the Genetics Laboratory of the Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences of the palms (IMLCF)has confirmed to EFE the estimated date for the completion of the regulations that will create the Canary Islands genetic database, “which will be at the beginning of next year”.
The geneticist is part of the Technical Commission of Historical Memory of Government of the Canary Islands which approved, on March 12, the regional strategy “that guarantees the recognition and reparation of the victims Canary Islands of the civil war and the Franco dictatorship”.
The Sin Identidad collective, which fights for the identification of stolen children, has denounced that the points established by the autonomous law on stolen minors approved four years ago have not yet been applied, among which is the creation of a DNA database.
José Pestano understands “the rush”, but assures that processes such as the creation of a DNA bank take time and “must be done well”, in addition to emphasizing that “it is useless to make the comparisons now, if we do not have a substantial number of samples collected”.
The way forward for the commission goes through a regulatory development that includes how it will be accessed, how the samples will be taken, what genetic profiles will be drawn, when genetic profiles will be sent and received at the national level and who will have access to them .
It will also be necessary to locate the database in a physical location and Pestano assures that it is still unknown which one it will be, whether the Institute of Legal Medicine in Las Palmas or in Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
“At the national level, the National Institute of Toxicology has taken the initiative to create the DNA bank for stolen children”, as is the case with those who disappeared from the Civil War, where Pestano is part of the national technical commission, “which already elaborates the administrative process”.
Until now, José Pestano’s work in the laboratory has been “private and voluntary”, which means that the results are not in the hands of anyone but himself, but he assures that the Administration will include his results as soon as the database is enabled. DNA.
The work of the geneticist has been divided among those who suffered reprisals from Francoism, of whom Jose Pestano it has the genetic profiles of all the bodies found in the Canary Islands; and stolen children, “whose samples do not reach ten people.”
Between the low volume of evidence in the study of stolen babies and the lack of relatives to contrast with the reprisals found, Pestano concludes that “there has been a lack of publicity and information about the existence of these particular processes.”
He director of the Genetics Laboratory of the Institute of Legal Medicine of Las Palmas He acknowledges that the Historical Memory associations know of his existence, but is aware that “there are many people outside of them” who have no information.
It is a fact for the researcher that this type of study “moves to a different level than the university level”, given that it arises from particular intentions and, despite “seeing good intentions in the Ministry of Justice”, until now, it has not been an institutional process.
José Pestano defends that “it is necessary to make appeals now”, with the aim of informing the citizens “of the imminent” creation of this institutional database and, once notified, get tested.
The genetic profile collection process consists of taking a buccal sample, kept at room temperature, and wrapped in special envelopes that, the geneticist says, “protect it for 20 or 30 years.”
One of the advances in this procedure is the “cheaper” of the techniques, in addition to the efficiency achieved with them. José Pestano celebrates having “left behind the use of freezers, which with a power outage, causes damage to many samples.”
In the case of stolen children, the geneticist sees the key “donating samples” from stolen mothers or children, while he does not believe a population screening is feasible due to the cost it would entail.
The analysis process has not been “so simple” in the case of the victims of Francoism, where the bones are, but many relatives have died.
Pestano clarifies that, despite the advances in nuclear DNA, which means expanding the genetic study beyond the maternal lineage provided by mitochondrial DNA, “a genetic study with very large generational jumps continues to be difficult”, such as the comparison of the DNA of a nephew in front of his reprisalized uncle.
However, the geneticist announces that, soon, his laboratory will have massive sequencing techniques, tools that will be used to analyze individuals from the same family, in a broader way, to establish the desired identification.
