The Dna Detective -- Searching For Argentina's Stolen Children

On the night of Sept. 3, 1976, soldiers stormed a house in suburban Buenos Aires, Argentina. The next day, officials announced that five "extremists" had died. Not a word appeared in news accounts about the family who lived at the house, the Lanuscous - a young couple, their 6-year-old son, their 4-year-old daughter and their 5-month-old, Matilde.

Relatives tried for years to trace the Lanuscous. They eventually got hold of five death certificates filed two days after the raid. In the fashion of the military, the documents were stamped N.N. - ningun nombre, no name - but the physical descriptions roughly fit the Lanuscous.

But it wasn't until after the military junta collapsed in 1983 that a judge was convinced to order the graves exhumed.

In January 1984, five coffins were dragged from their shallow pits. Four contained skeletons. But the smallest box held no human remains - only an infant's sleeper, pacifier and tiny socks.

Matilde Lanuscou was among the thousands of children scattered by the Argentine military's methodical campaign against "extremists," real or imagined, which left an estimated 12,000 to 20,000 people dead.

The children were taken from their doomed parents' arms and sold away, given as gifts, "adopted" by childless military families - leaving surviving relatives, often as not grandparents, to ache and wonder.

It would take a detective to find the missing children and reunite the broken families of Argentina. Instead, help from an unlikely source: Mary-Claire King, a geneticist from the University of California at Berkeley.

What King and scientists like her can do is read the molecules that hold the clues to human heredity.

From a drop of blood, a snip of hair, a baby tooth, they pluck a fragment of DNA. They whip up nearly 1 million copies of the fragment, enough to analyze, decipher, interpret; enough to identify a person, trace a family.

"It was like reading mystery novels and solving crossword puzzles and all those kinds of things rolled into one," said 45-year-old King. "And furthermore, it had the possibility of actually being good for something. Good for people."

Researchers scarcely imagined this technology when King began her studies 10 years ago. Today, designer enzymes - bio-blades that chop long DNA strands at specific spots - can be ordered over the telephone, like pizza. The machine that takes a DNA fragment and spins out copies isn't much harder to use than the newest Xerox. With these tools, science is replacing the bloodhound. And scientists are unraveling the mysteries up to 100,000 genes in the nucleus of every cell in tan body.

Genes are our "blueprints," guiding the cells to pump the chemicals that create life. Genes are a chronicle of human history, a crystal ball of fate.

King knows how to unlock the secrets of a gene, and in the process reveal the tie that binds one human being to another. That's the skill she offered up to the the grandparents of Argentina.

THE GRANDPARENTS' CAMPAIGN

The ruling generals had badly misjudged Argentina's oldest generation, the obstinate, resilient fury of women like Estella Carlotto. One Thursday in late 1977, Carlotto and the others defied the ban on public gatherings. They assembled in the Plaza de Mayo and marched quietly. Only their posters screamed for their vanished children and grandchildren.

The women returned to the square every Thursday. They called themselves Las Abuelas - the Grandmothers. They pinned down neighbors who had seen arrests, interrogated former prisoners, tracked down midwives who had been forced to assisted in delivering prisoners' babies.

Grandmothers traveled the country, spying on kids. One woman went to work as a maid in the house where she suspected her grandchild was growing up.

By late 1983, when the junta fell after its humiliation in the Falklands War, the grandmothers had an office stuffed with hunches, gossip, observations, common-sense conclusions - but little that would support a custody claim.

"They saw immediately, of course, that it was not sufficient to prove who the children were not," Mary-Claire King said. "But how are you going to prove who the child really is?"

Two grandmothers flew to Washington, D.C., and put this question to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A few months later, King went to Buenos Aires with an answer.

SCIENCE AND COMMITMENT

It was a 10-day tour sponsored by the association. King was the odd geneticist among four forensic experts who'd been handed a different question: how to identify thousands of corpses in unmarked graves. On the first night, before a packed auditorium, the scientists explained in their dry, technical way, what they could do.

When they finished, an old man slowly rose. In Spanish, he described the raid on the Lanuscou home, the five death certificates, the coffin with the baby's socks.

He wanted to know only one thing: Is it possible that Matilde's bones dissolved?

No, he was told. Bones do not dissolve.

In the silent room, the old man cried: Matilde, his granddaughter, was out there somewhere!

"His expression went from something horribly tragic to this sense of shock, then realization, then hope," King said now, although the recollection may reflect her own emotional swing. As she watched the face of Juan Miranda, King thought of her own daughter, Emily, who was Matilde's age, and flashed on her own activism during the '60s. She felt her clinical detachment crack.

Wherever Matilde was, King would try to bring her home.

"I thought there were just a few of these children," King said.

"Within a day, I knew of 145. And those were cases where the grandmothers actually had a lot. They had pictures of the parents. They knew the child was alive at some moment. Now, some of those children probably did not live through it all. But many of them did. And they were finding them."

By the standards of today's gene lab, 1984 was still the Stone Age. "Pre-DNA," researchers say; the era before they could readily study genes. Scientists had to content themselves with drawing inferences from the biochemicals that are the signatures of genes. It was like studying a blast of gunpowder to determine the make and caliber of a pistol.

To verify the grandmothers' hunches about which child came from which family, King worked with Ana Maria Di Lonardo, a Buenos Aires immunologist. They used the blood test standard in paternity cases. It analyzes human leukocyte antigens, or HLA, tiny proteins on the surface of white blood cells.

The beauty of HLA is its diversity. There are thousands of HLA combinations in any given population. Two people who have the same combination may be related or may match by chance - but the rarer the combination, the more likely they are to be kin.

In science, truth is never a certainty, only a probability. A 99.9 percent probability, King found, in the case of a girl named Paula.

Paula Eva Logares disappeared with her parents in May 1978. She was 22 months old. Two years later, the grandmothers were told about a girl who looked like Paula. This was Paula Lavallen, daughter of Ruben Lavallen, a police bureaucrat and former guard in the detention center where the Logares family had last been seen.

Paula Logares' grandmother, Elsa Pavon, trailed Paula Lavallen on and off for a few years. In December 1983, Pavon took the case to court. As soon as King arrived in Argentina, a judge ordered a blood test on Paula.

If Pavon was right, King would detect genetic threads from one maternal grandparent and one paternal grandparent in the blood of Paula Lavallen. And that's what happened.

But science did not rip Paula from her original family; politics did. And science, by itself, would not send Paula back to the home of her birth. Elsa Pavon and Ruben Lavallen fought over Paula all the way to the Supreme Court.

Lavallen did not challenge the genetic evidence. He argued that he and his girlfriend were the only parents Paula remembered. To remove her, he said - to hand her to a virtual stranger - would devastate her.

Elsa Pavon pointed out that kidnapping was a crime, even six years after the event. And Pavon asked: Who can be sure that Paula stored no memories before age 2? True, Paula did not talk about her biological parents. But, considering that her second father may have helped kill them, her silence probably meant more than a failure of memory.

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Elsa Pavon. At age 8, Paula went home.

"She walked in the front door," King said. "She turned left to the bedroom she used to use. She opened the door.

"She looked at the bed. And she said, `Where is my teddy bear?' "

TAPPING NEWEST TECHNIQUES

Success inspired the grandmothers. They pursued more cases. And King recruited more scientists.

To link a child to four living grandparents is as straightforward as following footsteps in fresh snow. But when some of the grandparents are dead - the likely scenario in Argentina after the junta - the HLA trail may turn cold. In almost every case, King had to deduce the HLA types of dead grandparents from surviving family members. The more relatives the better; not a simple task after a war of terror scattered families throughout the world.

King and the grandmothers enlisted geneticists in dozens of cities to do HLA typing. Heavyweights in medicine - people like Jean Dausset in Paris, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on HLA - ran tests on relatives of the missing.

Success also revealed the limitations of HLA. Children now turned up who clearly had not been born to the parents raising them. But few clues told who the natural families might be.

The new government established a voluntary national genetics data bank, a storehouse of blood samples from hundreds of families searching for kids. But to work well, the system needed a test even more specific than HLA.

To find it, King went to her former mentor, Allan Wilson, an iconoclastic professor of biochemistry who used genetic material called mitochondrial DNA.

The DNA that determines eye color, blood type and thousands of other traits sits in the nucleus of the cell. That DNA is inherited from both parents. But DNA in mitochondria - mini-molecules in the cell's fluid - is passed entirely from the mother through the egg.

Not only is a child's mitochondrial DNA identical to the mother's, it also matches the mitochondrial DNA of the maternal grandmother. And every maternal aunt. And every maternal uncle. And every cousin, niece and nephew related strictly through mothers.

King instantly recognized what she had. Mitochondrial DNA would link a child to even a lone grandmother.

Every detective story has a serendipitous moment; this was King's. Just as she stumbled onto mitochondrial DNA, the gene copy machine came along. For the first time, it was a snap to get enough of the stuff to work with. Now, only one question had to be settled: Is the DNA variable enough to rule out matches by chance?

The answer: Yes. King and Cristian Orrego, director of the evolutionary genetics laboratory at Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, calculated that the odds that two people would match by chance are less than 1 in 1,000.

This is how science moves forward. A technique developed to dig up the identities of some Argentine children may someday allow people everywhere to explore their heritage. Because of a few relentless grandmothers and a geneticist who likes puzzles, science is a closer to understanding who, exactly, we are.

STILL AMONG THE MISSING

For all its power, its wonder, science is not a magic wand. About 50 children, like Paula Eva Logares, have been found and told who they are. With teenagers now turning up, there are 160 unsolved cases.

The human booty of Argentina's dirty war is entering high school. And the kids are beginning to look for grandmothers.

And for every child who walks into the grandmothers' office, blood samples arrive in Berkeley.

The story has not ended for Amelia and Juan Miranda. They know only that someone tried to fake the burial of their baby granddaughter, Matilde Lanuscou, who would now be 15 years old.

"We continue searching," said Amelia Miranda, 68. "She is my flesh and blood."