From the Archives: A restitution effort in South Africa illustrates the challenges to scientists, policymakers, and living descendants as they navigate the complex repercussions of genetic analysis for unethically obtained human remains.
Her concerns involve larger questions of defining and understanding family ties. She fears, for instance, that genetic information can at times undermine people’s oral history and override valid connections contained in historical records. “There are a lot of means traditionally of tracing descendancy ancestry, which would be completely disregarded through this process,” she says.
This idea, Rassool adds, “does violence to the kind of work that needs to be done”—namely the slow, onerous, and often expensive work of consulting a community. Indigenous communities have reasons to be concerned. One cautionary example is a Native American tribe in the United States that gave genetic data to scientists to study type 2 diabetes, only to discover years later that it had been used to studythat were offensive to their cultural viewpoints—without their permission or informed consent.
Soaring COVID-19 numbers in South Africa pushed the schedules back. At around the same time, the Eastern Cape Stuurman family also wrote to the president’s office, asking that the remains stay in limbo until the government’s new Restitution and Repatriation Office is established, which may take months if not years.
In this respect, UCT’s efforts stand as a cautionary tale. It is probable that many other cases will soon come up in which multiple family branches can claim remains and questions about DNA will arise.
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