Turi King: Digging up the past with DNA sequencing
Remains of King Richard III. Image: Buckley et al (2013)
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To dig into it all, who better to chat to than University of Leicester geneticist, Professor Turi King who, in 2013, led the genetic identification on the remains of King Richard III in a carpark in Leicester.
I began our conversation asking how this historical missing person investigation came about in the first place.
Turi: So Richard III was King of England from 1483 to 1485. There are some contemporary records. One talks about him having one shoulder higher than the other. So when we were excavating, we thought maybe we'll find somebody with a spinal abnormality. But we weren't quite sure. What we know about Richard is from some historical records, but for a lot of people, their image of him comes from Shakespeare. But it's been known from historical records that Richard III was buried in the choir, the Church of the Greyfriars, that's been known for centuries.
Turi: Then 1538, you get the disillusion of the monasteries and the friary is torn down and a lot of it ends up in the cathedral over the road. The land is then bought by a chap called Robert Harrick, who talks about how Richard is buried in his garden type thing.
Turi: So the idea when we start the excavation is, okay we know where Richard's supposed to be in the friary. We're going to put two long thin trenches, staggered down the main car park because what we want to do is run the trenches north-south. We know the main walls of friary buildings run east-west, so if we run the trenches north-south, we won't be finding ourselves right in between them. We'll hopefully cross them and then we can start to work out, where are we? Because we need to generate a map of the friary to then home in on the choir.
Turi: Little do we know that the very first day that we do the excavation, six hours and 34 minutes in, we hit a little bit of leg bone. But you can't just excavate human remains. We have no idea where we are. We don't know if this set of remains is inside the church or outside the church. We still need to work out quite where we are. There's money already in the excavation pot to do up to six sets of remains, but ethically, you have to choose which six are those going to be.
Turi: We want to at least find the choir first, and we thought maybe this year it might be that we work out what the map is, and then next year we can hone in on where we think the choir might be. So we have to get a license from the Ministry of Justice. And so you apply and say, we're going to lift up to six sets of remains.
Turi: Obviously what we're going to be doing is making some educated and ethical decisions about which ones we're going to go for. So at this time, because we don't know where we are, we keep it covered, we don't uncover it, and we keep excavating. Then by the end of around the second week, we start to realise that actually we've uncovered what looks like a cloister walk, one end of what looks like the church. So it looks like where we found that skeleton on the first day is at one end of the choir, let's make that number one of our six that we've already got the money for. So we go and start excavating it. This is Joe Applebee, who is our osteologist, and I start excavating and we start from the legs and we start to move our way up.
Turi: Then it's getting late in the day. We can't leave a skeleton uncovered so it's decided we're not going to go any further. I've got to go to a conference the next day, a forensics conference in Innsbrook. So Joe is going to continue doing the excavation the following day on her own. And as I'm leaving to go off to this conference, I'm like, "I'm not going to miss anything. This will be a 90 year old friar, right? It won't be anything very exciting."
Turi: Then I text the next day when I landed at this conference in Innsbrook and I texted Joe and said, "so how's our 90 year old friar?" And she goes, "youngish male, head injuries, hunchback." Because she had been excavating, you work from the outside in, she'd done the skull. It's got battle injuries on it or injuries on it. Perimortem injuries, so at or around the time of death. But she's going, "okay, I'm not going to get too excited. This could be a friar who just met a nasty end or a patron or something."
Turi: But what she's then trying to do is work from the pelvis up to the skull, and she's trying to follow it in a straight line, the spinal column. And she's finding the vertebrae and then she suddenly can't find the vertebrae in a straight line. She starts going a bit sideways and she finds one, and then she finds another one, and she finds this curve, and she said the hair on the back of her neck went up because Richard is famously described in Shakespeare as being a hunchback. He's in the ground at the moment. She can't tell which way the spine, is it a hunchback or is it a sideways curve? So she said, "oh my goodness, this looks like it could be him." So I missed all of that!
Sally: What kind of permissions do you need to get to sequence the DNA of a skeleton that's been taken out the ground? Is there any kind of extra ethical permission step that you need to go through?
Turi: For remains that are over a hundred years old, you don't require permission. If you want to look at remains that are under a hundred years old, of someone who is deceased, then you need to seek permission of a relative. But for remains that are over a hundred years old, there's no special permissions that you need to go through. But we always go through the ethics committee at the university for that kind of thing.
Sally: Because Richard III is so famous and I think most people would agree it is ethical to sequence his DNA because we want to know it's him. There's a big cultural significance to it. But then what about DNA of more recent monarchs? So Queen Victoria, she died over a hundred years ago, but we know her family history. We know that the recently coronated King Charles is a direct descendant. So are there extra ethical steps then? There's still only a small number of generations between her and the current King of England.
Turi: With all of these things, there has to be a research question. It's not like you go and just do this willy-nilly type thing. I think this is the really interesting thing because some people will say, well, he was a king of England. Does this require special status? And I think, well actually when we're looking at human remains, we're looking at human remains regardless of who they are. That requires a real level of what is the research question? Is that a valid research question? Because one of the things that you are doing when you're looking at ancient DNA, you have to crush the bone to a powder. So, it is a destructive process. You have to think what is the research question here, and does it justify this process? Which is why you always go through ethical approval at your institution and consult widely about, what are the implications of doing this?
Sally: What was your research question with Richard III?
Turi: With Richard, it was identifying him. So that we needed to do the DNA analysis to be able to identify his remains.
Sally: To identify someone with DNA sequencing, usually you have a reference that you're comparing them to, like a relative. Who do you compare to in the case of a 600 year old king?
Turi: This is where you have to use really specific relatives. So the DNA that we have is a really complex mixture of just some of our many ancestors. That's because the way our DNA is passed down. It's this real mixture. But there's two pieces of DNA that are passed down through the generations in a really simple way.
Turi: One of these is mitochondrial DNA. So that's a small circular piece of DNA, it's in the egg. We girls, we pass it down to all of our children, but because it's in the egg, it's only daughters who pass it on. It's passed down virtually unchanged except for gradually you get little mutations that happen as it goes down through the generations, and we know about that so we can take that into account.
Turi: Then the other piece of DNA, which is passed down really simply is the Y chromosome. So that's one of our sex chromosomes. Men have got a Y chromosome and Y chromosome is passed down by a father to all of his sons who then pass it down through the male line as well. Again, it'll gradually accumulate little mutations as it's passed down and we know about that.
Turi: So we had female line relatives of Richard III. Richard could not pass down his mitochondrial DNA because he's a boy and he had no known living descendants who survived. He had a son who died quite young. He had its rumoured illegitimate children, a daughter and a son, both of whom didn't have children to pass down. So what we had to do was we had to go up the tree to Richard's mum, down again to Richard's sister who had a daughter, who had a daughter who had two daughters, down through the generations until we got to a chap called Michael Ibson.
Turi: He was actually known when the project started. He's living in London, happy to do a DNA sample. So that was great. But we want to find as many people as possible. Then we found this other lady called Wendy Duldig, I couldn't believe her surname when I heard it. It's like you are kidding me! It's not a dull dig we've been on, we've been on a very exciting dig. So I called this lovely lady who when I first rang her up and said, "hi, I'm Turi King. I'm calling from the University of Leicester. You might have heard about the Richard III project." And I start saying "I think you might be a relative and I'm wondering if you'd be interested in helping us by doing a DNA test?"
Turi: So we had two living female line relatives of Richard III. I'm looking at their mitochondrial DNA to see if there's a match, because that should be correct. If the tree is correct, there should be a match between them. Then if it's Richard, there should be a match there. And there was.
Sally: That's incredibly lucky though to have an unbroken mother-daughter, mother-daughter, mother-daughter line for that length of time.
Turi: Exactly, and it's quite tricky. We're quite lucky in the fact that Richard's from a Noble family, so his family tree is well documented.
Sally: So his fame there actually helped you answer the question of, was it him? Does being famous make a difference when we go back to this, what is the research question? Is there a justifiable reason to sequence someone's DNA? Because in the last episode we heard from Kat, they've recently sequenced the DNA of Van Gogh, and Beethoven. They've just done Mendel, sequencing the genetics of the geneticist!
Turi: The irony, right?
Sally: When it comes to, okay, this is a person who has died, so they cannot consent to their own sequencing of their DNA. I was previously having a chat about whether people should do 23andMe-style tests. And there's big questions as to whether you want to consent to do that or not. So how do you decide that it's okay? And does fame tip that balance one way or another?
Turi: My understanding is things with Beethoven, they were interested in finding about genetic predisposition towards things like deafness and they thought he had died of liver disease and all this kind of stuff. So it's marrying up genetics with the history and trying to understand whether or not the genetics can shed some light on what we know about the historical individual. It's a research question about trying to understand that. And that is a tricky one I think with famous individuals in terms of deciding about what your research question is.
Turi: But I think this whole understanding of what your research question is and the ethics behind it applies to anybody, any human remains you are working on. You can answer some really interesting questions through doing this kind of thing, like looking at population movements, understanding about ancient disease and how it's evolved, and how can that help us in understanding about how these diseases have evolved. So there can be some really interesting questions that you can answer using ancient DNA. It's a case of how much, how many of these sets of human remains do you deal with to answer that question? I think it's something which applies to every project, not just something when you're looking at famous individuals.
Sally: Who gets to decide or who should get to decide? You mentioned that there's this ethical committee, presumably at the University of Leicester, you're dealing with remains of a body in Leicester. But if you are going on expeditions, field trips around the world, then who gets to decide?
Turi: Oh, now that's a really important question. It's an area, particularly in North America, which is quite big at the moment. And that's looking at remains from indigenous populations.
Turi: I grew up in Canada. I grew up in Vancouver. In the late eighties, I started working on archaeological excavations. It was just the norm that on every excavation I was on, we knew whose land this was on. So we're working in this particular place and that's part of this First Nations land and they were always involved. I think that sometimes that's something that hasn't been happening in the past. For me, involving the First Nations communities is just something you would automatically do, but hasn't been for some people and hasn't been necessarily in the past. I think that's something which is incredibly important to do.
Turi: First of all, you have to speak with the local communities, the First Nations communities. But also what are the legal requirements of the country that you're working in, or the area that you're working in. You have to go through all of the proper processes and sometimes that might mean that you don't get to work on those remains because it's decided that no, we don't want you to do that. And that has to just be it.
Turi: I think it's all about engagement. It's about going through the proper ethical and legal processes. Engagement with the communities, talking about what would they like to know? We might have our research questions. What would they like to know? And how can we work together collaboratively on this project? Also, once the project is finished, what's next? How is that information looked after? I think that's really, really important to have. These are human remains and we may feel about them differently than other people do. Certain groups, there will be a real spiritual tie with ancestors that we possibly don't have when we think about our own ancestors. We have to be really sensitive to that. So I think it's incredibly, incredibly important to work on any projects like that in a collaborative basis within the legal framework that's specific to what you're working on.
Sally: There's so many different ethical considerations here and fairly recently, a group of geneticists published a list of five recommendations for researchers working on ancient DNA. And they had some ethical dilemmas, like little 'what if' stories. I just want to read one of them to you because to me, I don't know where I would start with this. So bear with me as I just read what one of these hypothetical ethical dilemmas is.
Sally: Archaeologists based in Southern Africa approach a genetics lab in Europe about an important new find. They've excavated a site that provides the earliest evidence of metal tool production, which includes an extensive graveyard. Without consulting anyone, the archaeologist sends skeletal remains of a hundred people to the lab. No one's ever studied such a large sample of remains from this very ancient period.
Sally: A postdoc in the lab does some searching online and learns that this site is hugely controversial. Two local tribes have battled over the site, each claiming to be descended from it. One tribe, the majority in the region, supports the archaeological work and living members have even offered their DNA for comparison. The minority tribe, however, objects to the excavations and argues that it is sacrilegious to disturb the dead. What should the geneticists do?
Turi: You stop right there because this has been done without consultation and these are human remains, so you stop right there. I think what you have to do is you have to go back and talk to the various groups and discuss about what the idea is about the study, what you'd want to have a look at, what it would involve, and you would have to have quite a large consultation about this and check whether or not, when the archaeologists were doing the excavation, have all proper procedures been followed legally and make sure that everything has been done properly. And also have a plan for if it does go ahead and it may not because if people are really objecting, then what happens afterwards? Who's involved in this? Do members of the community go on the paper? Are they involved with it? This sort of thing. So you'd have to stop right there and I think probably start almost from square one with that one, I think.
Sally: In this hypothetical scenario, it sounds like after the consultation that the majority tribe will be in favour of it and the minority tribe will be against it. It's both of their histories. So you could say, okay, well there's obviously this controversy we are going to step back, but then does one side have a right to know? Because it is very similar to the modern ethical questions that we have when we were talking about Chris Hemsworth getting his Alzheimer's genetic test, for example. If one family member wants to know, they share that genetic history, genetic information with their current family members. So if you find out, you're also making the decision for them. So in this situation, which is hypothetical, where you have these two contrasting opinions and you can't have one finding out and one not finding out. You can't have a middle ground here. Either the information is known or it isn't. How do you balance those two sites?
Turi: I think that would be an incredibly difficult situation to be in. I personally would not want to go ahead unless both sides were happy with it. I think that that involves dialogue because it may be that after you speak to the minority group and you explain what it is that you want to do and find out what their concerns are, is there anything that they would be interested in finding out it?
Turi: It may well be that after the consultation that they go, "actually, no, we would like to find out." Or it may be that they don't. I think that that's really difficult. These are not your remains to start playing with and doing the genetic analysis with. I think it has to be something that if there is concerns around it, you don't do it.
Sally: You could argue that if you go back far enough in time, this is everybody's history. Especially with the human population bottleneck. If you go back far enough, sure, they are more directly related, presumably to the people on the land where you find them, but it's still the history of almost all people on the planet. So does the whole planet get to have a say?
Turi: This is where you start running into a complete kind of ethical, I suppose with all ethical questions, it's about benefits and outweighing, versus not. And so I think that has to come into it. Yeah, it's an incredibly difficult question. I would always err on the side of caution with this sort of thing.
Turi: But it is interesting. For example, years ago I was approached by a chap who believed that his great-aunt may have been one of the last canonical victims of Jack the Ripper. He was happy to do a DNA test to prove that this was his aunt. So that would mean then going and excavating the remains of this woman called Mary Jane Kelly. Now, Mary Jane Kelly was killed in the 1800s, thought to be the last main victim of Jack the Ripper. And she's buried in a graveyard in London, but she's buried in a communal grave. We know from the records from the graveyard that she's surrounded by several people and she's kind of on top of a stack of people who are buried there essentially.
Turi: In the 1940s, what happened was they took up all of the gravestones and then they reordered them. So we did a desk-based study to go, how likely is it that if we tried to excavate them, we might come down on top of Mary Jane Kelly? Because in order for me to do the DNA analysis or anybody to do the DNA analysis, you've got one end of it. You've got this great-nephew, but you have to know that the skeleton that you're looking at is Mary Jane Kelly. Because if there isn't a DNA match between them, how do you know it's not because you've just got the wrong skeleton there.
Turi: So to go and actually excavate in this site, you would also be trying to trace living descendants to say, look, are you happy? Because we would be disturbing these graves trying to find Mary Jane Kelly's grave. There would be several hundred people in there of whose descendants you would have to try and trace and contact and then ask them, how do you feel about this?
Turi: Just one of them has to say no and you would stop. So we felt we're not even going to start. This is completely unethical to disturb so many graves in the hopes of finding a single individual whose remains may or may not even be there anymore. And how would we identify them anyways if they've been dug through?
Turi: So ethically speaking, we thought this is just not right. We couldn't possibly do this. And it was interesting because in the case of Richard III, there was a case bought by people who are descended from Richard's family about where he should be reburied and that they hadn't been consulted, but there were estimated between about one and 17 million people alive today who are equally related to Richard III as he was. So what are you going to do? Trace every single one and contact all of them and ask for their opinion? So that that case was thrown out of court because it's simply not possible to do and it's so far back and of the public interest in terms of identifying the remains.
Turi: So yeah, there are sometimes where you simply look at a case and you go, no, I'm not happy to go there because I think ethically the research question does not justify the disturbance of these remains. It doesn't justify it.
That’s all for now. Thanks to Professor Turi King for chatting with me.
We’ll be back next time with a special look at the Genetics Society symposium when Kat will be chatting with some of this year’s speakers on the topic of DNA: Past, Present and Future.
