The identification of the Romanovs: Can we (finally) put the controversies to rest?

In the summer of 2007, three amateur Russian archeologists discovered 44 bone fragments and teeth near the Old Koptyaki Road in Ekaterinburg, Russia (Figures 1 and 2). The discovery was approximately 70 m from the site where the remains of Tsar Nicholas II were discovered about 30 years earlier (Figure 3). I was the Chief of the Research Section at the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL) at the time and was on vacation when the reports from Russia hit the news. I thought it would be unlikely that AFDIL would be involved in the testing, given the large number of ancient DNA laboratories capable of testing the remains now compared to the few laboratories available in the early 1990s, when the first set of remains was recovered.About one month or so later, LTC (Dr) Lou Finelli (the laboratory's director) called me in the office to discuss the possibility that AFDIL would be invited in the testing of the remains. Peter Sarandinaki of the Scientific Expedition to Account for the Romanov Children (S.E.A.R.C.H.) Foundation (http://www.searchfoundationinc.org/ webcite) had spent years of his life to find the missing Romanov children, and he was able to convince the Russian authorities that AFDIL should be involved in the testing [1].The eventual fall of Tsar Nicholas II (Figure 4) and the growth of Soviet Communism changed the course of history. I propose that the identification of the Romanov remains was also a defining moment for forensic DNA testing, almost as critical as the first application of "DNA fingerprinting" using restriction fragment length polymorphism technology [2,3] to identify Colin Pitchfork's DNA [4]. The identification of the Romanovs was an important breakthrough in the development and acceptance of forensic autosomal short tandem repeat (STR) and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) testing for highly compromised skeletal remains.Despite the overwhelming evidence for establishing the identity of the Romanov family, a small but vocal number of scie