DNA work on cave bears led to breakthrough that identified Emil Kapaun, other soldiers
Odile Loreille is something of a legend among DNA searchers looking for lost soldiers.
She started as a bright scientist wanting a challenge. But in the ten years she spent trying to put names to the unknown soldiers buried in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific – the Punchbowl, on the island of Oahu, it became personal: “I came to care about all of those guys, as though they are family. Once you know their stories, you never get them out of your head.”
Odile was a happy native of France for her first 35 years. She married a nice Dutch guy, gave birth, read all she could get her hands on about Neanderthals, our ancient species cousins.
Science sometimes lures devotees down loopy paths. As a young scientist she was enthralled by the work of Svante Paabo, the Swedish geneticist who founded paleo-genetics and got the remains of ancient Neanderthals and ancient Homo Sapiens to give up historical secrets — what they looked like, for example, right down to the probable colors of their skin and hair. “I wanted to study Neanderthals too.”
She did not. But she did something semi-related: Breakthrough work in which she amplified DNA signatures out of a giant creature that terrified and enthralled those ancient humans — cave bears. Cave bears stood 11.5 feet tall, weighed 1,300 pounds and went extinct tens of thousands of years ago. But from their (seriously degraded) DNA, she discovered much about what they looked like, how they lived, how they are related to today’s much smaller brown bears.
Her parents were disappointed. “Who studies cave bears?” But when she went job hunting in 2004, the Americans at the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory snapped her up.
Those Americans faced a dreadful problem: They wanted to identify more than 800 remains of Korean War soldiers who had been buried in the Punchbowl. But they had discovered that American anthropologists had treated those bones with a preservative soon after our Korean War enemies had given them to us after the war. In 1954 they had soaked them in vats of formaldehyde. No one in 1954 knew what DNA was, but later anthropologists discovered that the preservative had destroyed most of the DNA signatures in those bones.
This discovery gnawed at the DNA searchers for years. Tim McMahon, who would eventually run the chief DNA lab, had met some of the families of the lost men he was searching for. “Listening to their loss, clear that it’s all like yesterday to them, no matter how many years have passed. It’s heart-wrenching.”
It was a problem that the French scientist Odile Loreille was ideally trained to solve.
One cave bear whose DNA she obtained had been dead (and decaying) for more than 100,000 years. The American DNA scientists, based then in Rockville, Md., loved this: If she could get usable DNA from a bear 1,000 centuries old, maybe she could get usable DNA from the Punchbowl unknowns.
The Americans were frustrated, perhaps desperate. “When I came there, I suspected most of them thought the problem probably couldn’t be solved,” Odile said.
“Solve the Punchbowl,” they said — her actual job description.
Describing how she did it would take a book in which nearly every sentence would be incomprehensible to all but DNA obsessives. We’ll just say here that she tried and failed to extract DNA from the unknowns but figured out how to amplify their DNA.
She worked for ten years. It became not only personal but specific, no longer theoretical.
In 2008 she tested her DNA creations on a Punchbowl unknown.
The lab flew her to Honolulu. She rode one day into the Punchbowl with a dig team.
They dug up casket 14891, containing the bones of a man who Chinese soldiers in 1954 had dug up from prison Camp Five, village of Pyoktong, North Korea.
“I was right there,” Odile said. “I literally told them which bone samples to cut.”
It would be years before she and other scientists perfected all the protocols the lab uses now.
But from those cuts made in the bones of casket 14891 in 2008 she successfully sequenced endogenous DNA; no one had done that before. And she discovered who 14891 was.
Cpl. Roy Stewart, 26 years old at death, was an African-American soldier from Jackson, Miss., who fought in Korea with the U.S. Army’s 9th Infantry regiment and was captured by North Korean soldiers in November 1950; he died four months later in Camp Five. Because of Odile, he went home at last to his family.
His sister buried him in Arlington National Cemetery. Odile came to the funeral. “Roy was my Emil Kapaun.”
It’s not easy to contact Odile these days. Phil O’Brien, a Pentagon analyst (and Father Kapaun searcher who has known her for years), says she is delightful, brilliant, and fond of talking about genres of European art. And that she works now as a DNA scientist for the FBI. She likes Phil, too. “Phil is a genius,” she said. “I miss him.”
She likes her FBI job, which is a secret. “I’m not allowed to say a word about what I do now. But I will say that as a French girl, I would have laughed if anyone had said I’d one day work for the FBI.”
She later helped get a 4,000-year-old royal Egyptian mummy to give up a few DNA secrets. She helped DNA-identify two of the Russian Romanov children -- murdered by the Soviets when they shot the royal family by firing squad in 1918. She says her work is fulfilling.
But the most profound achievement in her career was spending ten years of her life helping to solve the problem at the Punchbowl.
“She built the foundation,” said DNA scientist Tim McMahon, who know runs the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in Dover, Delaware. “After her, the rest of the team built on what she did.”
Because of her, (and ancient giant cave bears) the family of Father Emil Kapaun – and hundreds of other families -- would get a second chance at bringing home a lost loved one.
This story was originally published September 26, 2021 at 12:00 AM.