UB and Bosch i Gimpera Foundation participate in a pioneering human DNA bank for relatives of Spanish Civil War victims

Photograph by Salvador Redó published on the newspaper Regió7 on 16.11.2012.
Photograph by Salvador Redó published on the newspaper Regió7 on 16.11.2012.
(22/05/2014)

The Laboratory of Forensic Genetics of the Legal and Forensic Medicine Unit at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Barcelona (UB), together with the Bosch i Gimpera Foundation, is in charge of creating and maintaining a human DNA bank for the relatives of victims of the Spanish Civil War and Francoʼs dictatorship. Its aim is to help those people who are looking for their relativesʼ disappeared bodies which may be in any of the 240 mass graves that are in Catalonia. Marc Antoni Malagarriga Picas and Roger Heredia Jornet, promoters of the project, are looking for his uncle and great-grandfather, respectively. Genetic identity tests have been used to identify a body, but it is not common —in fact, there is only one similar case in Bosnia and Herzegovina— to create a bank with frozen DNA samples to be used when unidentified bodies can be exhumed. It has just been set up a crowd funding campaign on the website Verkami to collect money to fund the bank.

Photograph by Salvador Redó published on the newspaper Regió7 on 16.11.2012.
Photograph by Salvador Redó published on the newspaper Regió7 on 16.11.2012.
22/05/2014

The Laboratory of Forensic Genetics of the Legal and Forensic Medicine Unit at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Barcelona (UB), together with the Bosch i Gimpera Foundation, is in charge of creating and maintaining a human DNA bank for the relatives of victims of the Spanish Civil War and Francoʼs dictatorship. Its aim is to help those people who are looking for their relativesʼ disappeared bodies which may be in any of the 240 mass graves that are in Catalonia. Marc Antoni Malagarriga Picas and Roger Heredia Jornet, promoters of the project, are looking for his uncle and great-grandfather, respectively. Genetic identity tests have been used to identify a body, but it is not common —in fact, there is only one similar case in Bosnia and Herzegovina— to create a bank with frozen DNA samples to be used when unidentified bodies can be exhumed. It has just been set up a crowd funding campaign on the website Verkami to collect money to fund the bank.

“To determine family relationship by means of DNA is easier when the relation is direct —for instance between parents and children—; the more distant gets the relation, the more difficult is to identify the body”, explains Carme Barrot, researcher from the Department of Public Health of UB. Therefore, time is against the project because the closest relatives of a death person —sons and daughters or nephews and nieces— are old people. The relatives of those people who disappeared are fighting for the support of admirations to open mass graves and find the bodies of parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts. Last December, the Parliament of Catalonia approved a motion to meet the recommendations of the report published by the Committee on Enforced Disappearances (CED) of the United Nations. The motion supports the creation of a human DNA bank for the relatives of disappeared people in Catalonia to facilitate their identification and urges the Government to allocate the resources needed.

The main objective of the crow funding campaign set up on Verkami is to increase DNA bank. To achieve that aim, for example, an interactive documentary will be created in order to disseminate the existence of the DNA bank and encourage participation. Promoters affirm that nowadays around 4,600 families in Catalonia are looking for a relative who disappeared during the Civil War or Franco regime.

To join the DNA bank, it is necessary to extract a blood sample to the relatives of the disappeared person. The part of the dried blood sample that contains purified DNA is kept at -75 °C in the Laboratory of Forensic Genetics of UB, led by Dr Manuel Gené. Another part of the sample is given to participants together with all the documents that credit it. The process, managed by the Bosch i Gimpera Foundation, cost 150 euros. It is important to remember that the polymerase chain reaction technique has been used to amplify DNA since the 1990s; it enables identification by means of a small biological sample (hair, saliva, bloodstain, etc.).

 

The figure of Bosch i Gimpera

Nine families have already given blood samples to the DNA bank at UB. One of them is the family of Juli Martí Cristià, who disappeared in 1938 in Villar de los Navarros. His son, Eduard, has been looking for the body of his father during more than ten years. Encouraged by the desire to preserve the memory of his family, Eduard Martí has around one hundred letters written by his father from the front. These letters tell the story of his father, from the moment he enlisted in December 1936 —as a volunteer when he was 43 years old—, then his fight in some towns in the front of Teruel, and finally the moment when he was captured and killed by Francoʼs troops. Eduard Martí explains that the figure of Pere Bosch i Gimpera has appeared in the vicissitudes of his family twice. The first time was during the Spanish Civil War, when the former rector of UB, acquaintance of the family, helped his mother, Mercè Valss, to find a job when his husband disappeared. Now, more than seventy years later, Eduard Martí has come to the Bosch i Gimpera Foundation to be part of the DNA bank in the hope that the body of this father will be identified. Eduard, who is 89 years old, is the only alive son of Juli Martí.

Since 1975, the Laboratory of Forensic Genetics of UB studies human genetic variability applied to forensic genetics and its main applications: biological paternity determination and forensic identification. It is a pioneering centre in researching and applying the most modern techniques.