The home, which was run by an order of Catholic nuns and closed in 1961, was one of many such institutions that housed tens of thousands of orphans and unmarried pregnant women who were forced to give up their children throughout much of the 20th century.
In 2014, historian Catherine Corless tracked down death certificates for nearly 800 children who died at the home in Tuam between the 1920s and 1961 — but could only find a burial record for one child.
Ok, atrocities aside, how the hell can you tell age from DNA? DNA doesn’t change as you age.
Your DNA sequence is generally pretty stable, but other characteristics do. Epigenetics is the field. Another example is methylation, which is basically like your cell putting a post-it note that says “don’t use this” on a particular region. By looking at a bunch of different methylation sites an age can be estimated.
But in this case, it appears that the article is just mixing up “genetic testing was performed” and “the ages were determined” (separate statements from previous articles.)
Honestly, the area of forensic science is in question for me. You would have a better time determining approximate age from bone development and skull hardness. I think the journalist is rushing to be the first to publish.
It’s an old story. The age range determination was like 2014, the big headline for genetic testing was done in like 2018.
It actually does, telomeres shorten, this is one of the most important reasons why we, you know, age.
Telomeres don’t shorten at a fixed rate, though, so determining age from that doesn’t work.
You don’t, the „journalist“ just made that up instead of searching for a minute finding details that would have enabled them to write a proper article.
There’s even an extensive Wikipedia article outlining known facts and atrocities - dumping the bodies is probably the least atrocious thing they’ve done.
There is even a Tuam Home Survivors website listing the names of the deceased and how they were uncovered by the historian.
Apparently this week they started a new dig to uncover the bodies as they found some but not nearly all of them.
It took me just a couple of minutes to uncover the info and write a tiny bit of that down. This is how journalism dies.
EDIT: This ARTE.tv Documentary outlines that DNA is used as you would expect: to identify the remains of lost relatives.
Thank you. I asked myself same. Telomeres I guess you would need to know the length after birth. But we only have one sample (moment of death). Plus the victims bodies are probably not very good preserved. My best guess is, the text is just not accurate and they might used DNA testing for different things (sex, etc).
Telomere length is the only thing I can think of, but that’s totally a guess and I don’t know much about it. Telomeres, as I understand it, are padding at the end of DNA and shorten as you age.
I’d guess they look at the telomeres but I don’t how accurate it can be.