Forensics, DNA, and Identifying Missing Soldiers

How do you identify human remains? Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice explore DNA and the task to identify the remains of missing soldiers with biomedical scientist Tim McMahon and forensic anthropologist Franklin Damann. What is the DPAA?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist, and I got Chuck Nice with me as usual. Chuck, baby.

• 0:22Chuck Nice?

  Hey Neil, what's happening?

• 0:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, very good, very good. You know, we got a really deep subject today. Oh my gosh.

• 0:30Chuck Nice?

  Which is why I was trying to figure out why I'm here. When I saw the actual copy for the show, I was, I was like, I think they got the, did I receive this by mistake, this email?

• 0:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Using, using forensic science to identify missing soldiers.

• 0:48Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 0:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my gosh.

• 0:50Chuck Nice?

  Very important work.

• 0:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and of course, I mean, why wouldn't this be a thing, right? I mean, you know, we got forensics for crime, we got, you know, we got DNA for, for exoneration, and it seems like there's a lot of bits and pieces that you put it all together in one sort of scientific chemistry biology work universe. And so the Department of Defense has an entire branch of itself that specializes in just this. And we've got two guests today who will take us deep into what those operations are, how they work, and what their success rates are, and they'll just, just keep us up to date on what has been happening over these recent years as it tracks the progress of science.

• 1:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And leading off, we've got Dr. Tim McMahon. Tim, welcome to StarTalk.

• 1:38Speaker 02

  Neil, thank you. Chuck, nice to meet you as well. It's, it's an honor for me to be here and chat with you on DNA.

• 1:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent, thank you. You're a biomedical scientist and Director of the DOD, Department of Defense, DNA Operations. So of course that's gotta be a thing. So, so first tell me-

• 1:56Chuck Nice?

  It's very men in black, Tim, I gotta tell you.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I'll get, I'll give you men in blue since blue suits are my favorite. So we'll go with men in blue then.

• 2:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And also, for those who can see this in video, Tim is wearing a vibrant red tie.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's not men in black uniform, for sure. But let me ask, the Defense Prisoner of War and Missing in Action Accounting Agency, that's a mouthful. What can you tell us about that?

• 2:24Speaker 02

  So the DPAA is actually, they're the organization that is in charge with the recovery and identification of a missing service members.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  My organization is the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System, and we're actually partnered with the DPAA. We actually provide all DOD with human remains DNA identification. So not only for the past accounting mission, where we help the DPA identify our fallen heroes from World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War, but also all of our current day losses as well. And, you know, you were talking about DNA and crime. You know, the first time DNA was used in a criminal case was in 1987 in England. In 1991, the military used DNA for the first time to assist with the identification of a service member from Vietnam, but also with current day losses

• 3:20Speaker 02

  at the close of Operation Desert Storm of the first Gulf War. That actually set up our laboratory and established the DNA laboratory under the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System.

• 3:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But excuse me, it's not just remains in a battlefield. There are places where fallen soldiers have been buried anonymously, right? We think of, you know, the beaches of Normandy. I'm just thinking, you know, Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam. Not every place is just, here's a box of remains, go to work. It's got to be more complicated than that, isn't it?

• 3:56Speaker 02

  It is much more complicated. And my cohort at the DPA, Dr. Franklin Damon, who you'll be chatting with, he will be able to give you a much more in-depth on that. But they, we, we are mandated by the United States government. You know, we, we leave no man behind. And so the, there's been active recoveries. For example, for Vietnam since the close of the Vietnam War. And then with Korea and World War Two. But for example, in our own cemetery, in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii, there are unknown service members who were recovered but could not be identified.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  The, those are the DNA samples for one set of types of remains called disinterments that come to my lab that we will test and, and obtain the DNA out of those and then run a couple of different tests on them. But unlike a modern crime scene where, for example, if I committed a crime, they could take a swab from my cheek and they could do that direct reference that way. We don't have that ability. So we actually have to rely on family members to donate samples to us that we can then compare to these unknowns to assist with the identification effort.

• 5:16Chuck Nice?

  So when you exhume, well, I, I suppose you don't need to exhume an entire body because if it's DNA, you only need a sample. And then what do you do from there? You create a database? Or do you create a familial database and then work backwards?

• 5:33Speaker 02

  So that's, Chuck, that's actually an excellent question. We, we have proactively been collecting references since 1992. So for example, for the original 8100 missing at the end of the Korean War. I have family references in a database for 92% of those missing. So we do have that family reference database. For Vietnam, we're at about 86%. And then World War II was recently added in about 2010. And so we have about 18% of the original 72,000 missing. But if you look at, for example, the USS Oklahoma.

• 6:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But just to be clear, USS Oklahoma, that's in Pearl Harbor. So December 7th, 1941, the ship sank with servicemen inside the ship, entomating them. Is that, do I understand this correctly?

• 6:29Speaker 02

  And then the ship was righted and those remains were recovered and they were interred in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific as unknowns. In my lab, we received 363 out of 394 references. So we had references for 363 of those, which, once you start getting really over 80% coverage, DNA becomes a strong supporting line of evidence for identification. But Chuck, to answer your question, when we disinter, you're going to hear from my esteemed colleagues all about the excellent work that they do. And it's not just DNA. DNA is one means of identification.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  It's about all of the information coming together. For example, their stature, which is anthropology, and there's dental, and there's historical evidence and things like that. So it's about building the full picture. I'm just one cog in that picture, which is the DNA portion of it.

• 7:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay. But how do you, but, so normally when we think of bones, we don't think of DNA. We think of, like you said, cheek samples or skin samples or, so, but there is sort of living, was living tissue inside of bones at some point in their history. Is that where you get the DNA? Because otherwise, the calcium, I don't think would be very helpful.

• 7:51Speaker 02

  No, so you're absolutely right. So. Um, the, the actual osteocytes, which is the formal word for the, the DNA containing cells within the bone, that DNA is protected. And so we actually can take a portion of the bone and grind that bone up into a powder. And then we add a buffer to it. Um, we call it demineralization buffer. It's a big word, but I want you to think of turpentine. If you drop turpentine on the hood of your car, you dissolve that paint completely. Well, this-

• 8:23Chuck Nice?

  Well, well, do I know that?

• 8:25Speaker 02

  So that buffer dissolves that bone powder completely and frees up all of the DNA. But when we do that, in that liquid now is not only the human DNA, there's bacterial DNA, there's fungal DNA, anything that was in the environment that could have soaked into that bone as well over time.

• 8:48Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  And so we have to, we have to purify the DNA. And what I tell people the most is you think about that last cup of coffee, nobody wants to drink of all the grinds in it. If you were to pass that coffee back through a filter, the grinds would stay on top and you get the pure coffee. Well, we have a specialized filter that the DNA binds to, and we can wash away everything we don't want. But then we have-

• 9:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's being, that's being very clever. I mean, presumably you didn't have that initially and someone said, I have an idea. Uh, I have DNA Velcro.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, and so, no, this, I mean, you know, you're speaking like, yeah, this is there, but oh my gosh, people are inventing this stuff all along.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  And it is. So the earliest point that, you know, DNA was identified was in 1950s. It was in the 60s that the first purification methods came out, but it wasn't that filter didn't come around until 1984. And now we can actually use magnets. We can bind the DNA to a special particle and then use a magnet to pull the DNA out of it.

• 9:52Chuck Nice?

  I gotta hear more about that. That's, that's just, okay, that's sci-fi insane right there. So, oh, please do just that process for a second, you know? And then Neil can tell me, can you magnetize anything?

• 10:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I'm gonna presume Tim means that it's a chemical magnet and magnet is metaphorical. I'm gonna assume that, Tim.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  No, so actually.

• 10:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, ow! Okay, don't say anymore, cuz you're top secret clearance.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  No, actually, it's a small sphere that is charged. And it then has a, it has a special binding agent that allows the DNA to bind to it based on a charge. And because it's metal, you can then hold a magnet against the side of the tube. And that pulls that metal sphere with the DNA to it. And then we can wash away everything else. And then you rehydrate the DNA at that point, and that breaks the bond off of that sphere, and you get the pure DNA.

• 10:55Chuck Nice?

  Oh my, that's cra- okay.

• 10:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's called science!

• 10:59Chuck Nice?

  It is called science, but I'm gonna tell you, and no disrespect to the process or the importance of it. But they do the same thing with cocaine.

• 11:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you serious?

• 11:10Chuck Nice?

  I'm dead serious!

• 11:12Speaker 02

  It is a chemical process, you know? And the easiest way I tell people is, you know, when we grew up, there was that little toy that looked like the face, and you had the magnet, had the ferrous metal in there, and you could draw the beard on it. And that's what we're doing, is you're basically binding the DNA and then putting a magnet and pulling it out that way.

• 11:31Chuck Nice?

  Fascinating.

• 11:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and Chuck, I didn't know that about cocaine, you know?

• 11:37Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I mean, it's not exactly that, cuz you know, as much money as, you know, these drug dealers have, they don't wanna spend it on science.

• 11:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All I know is that drug dealers were metric fluent before anyone in the United States was. And so.

• 11:53Chuck Nice?

  That's true.

• 11:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They sell in kilos and things.

• 11:55Chuck Nice?

  That is a true statement.

• 11:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Tim, is there a, I know there's a lot of research, not only in private industry, but also in the DOD. So who is leading the DNA frontier today? Is it your kind of research, cuz you've got deep government pockets for that? Or is it 23andMe, right? Where, because that's an entire commercial enterprise that's driven by market forces?

• 12:22Speaker 02

  So, Neil, that's a great question. It's actually a combination of both. So when you, so we do the exact same tests that your state and local and the FBI do for criminal casework because any unidentified human remains that are found in the local fall underneath your local police jurisdiction. So that's where you see they're using these commercial tests and now you see through investigative, what's called investigative genetic genealogy where they're able to utilize what we call direct to consumer companies, where they can then use, build off of the 23andMe and ancestry.com and guide police

• 13:06Speaker 02

  into identifying either a cold case perpetrator of a crime or an unknown person who died and they had no way forward. The difference is those are geared toward modern DNA samples. These are DNA samples that have been protected over the years. We have to take either what's been commercially developed, break it and make it work for ours that have been in the environment 80 plus years have seen chemical insults from being prepared for burial or from post-traumatic fire, from a crash in an airplane, or in a lot of it, I call it fit for use. We have to develop that test.

• 13:48Chuck Nice?

  So the police and 23andMe, they're collecting samples for the purposes of identification and lineage, whereas you guys have to create that yourself.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  Right. So what, what, what the police do is if you have a cold case and they isolated DNA, let's say from an unknown human remains. So this is an individual that was found in the woods. The police get it. They develop a profile. They then search the FBI's missing person database. It doesn't hit to it. Investigators have no leads. It's now a cold case. They can work with companies like Orthrum and Parabond and a lot of other direct to consumer companies out there to develop this, what we call a single nucleotide polymorphism profile, which is your ancestry markers, your identity markers. And then they can

• 14:42Speaker 02

  search Jetmatch, which is a searchable database, and they can identify potential leads of who this person may be. And then the police investigators will investigate, they will find. And then if they find a reference, they will collect a reference from that person, match it, and then make an identification that way.

• 15:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So every day that goes by, the database gets better for everybody?

• 15:09Speaker 02

  In, in, in the commercial sector, yes. The more people that get in there, the better the database gets. But for our case, we, we have already developed that database, but those commercial assays won't work with ours. So for example, what I tell people is, if you, and I'm a knuckle dragger from, from being a mechanic when I was younger in, in school is, I was there when we switched from standard sockets to metric sockets.

• 15:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  And so.

• 15:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I hear the drug dealers had that same kind of.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  They did. You know, they did. They had to start figuring out how to go from pounds to kilos.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  So, but, you know, if you have a standard socket, there's a 716, a 10 millimeter may work on it once, but then it will strip it. And so what we have to do is we have to make that test to work. So for example, the chemically treated sample, so at the end of the Korean War, uh, as part of Operation Glory, the United States received, uh, about 4,000 sets of remains. About 850 of those could not be identified. They were buried in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific and Hawaii is unknowns. When the DPA went in disinterred, we could not get a DNA result from them. And it took

• 16:29Speaker 02

  16 years and science to catch up. But in 2016, we developed and validated a method that allowed us to get DNA results from it using what we call next generation sequencing. That's those instruments that you hear about personalized medicine.

• 16:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  So we adapted, we adapted from the medical side, brought it in, created a test that is not commercially available. And since 2016, we've gone from seven samples a month.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  To over 70 samples a month and went from a 20% success rate to over 68% success rate just with that. And it's led to over 200 new identifications for people who previously would not have worked because the commercial tests like 23andMe and Ancestry.com or the commercial short tandem repeat tests, which are the markers your state and local crime labs use, wouldn't work. We've had to make them work with our type samples.

• 17:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to remind people, you mentioned, did you say customized medicine? Or just, I want to just remind people that we can imagine a future where the medicine you are prescribed knows about your entire DNA profile so that you can minimize side effects and have the medicine do exactly what it needs to do. We're not quite there yet, but from what you're saying, we're on the doorsteps of this sort of thing.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  And it's being used. I mean, some of the new drugs that have come out for, say, pancreatic cancer has been based on that deep sequencing of multiple different types of pancreatic cancer. And I will say, you know, a family member of mine is the benefit of that, those new drugs. He was, he was a type 3, basically, when you think about that, and is now in full remission because of the technology and the ability to look at multiple people very quickly and multiple different types of strains to personalize that medicine to help people out.

• 18:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, tell me, you know, I have rudimentary awareness and knowledge of DNA. What does it mean to track mitochondrial DNA versus nuclear DNA? What is going on there when you guys pick and choose what aspect of the molecule you care about?

• 18:51Speaker 02

  So, it's very quick. So, within your body, you have two types of DNA. And I tell people to think of a computer. The hard drive is like the nucleus within your cell. And that's, that hard drive tells your computer what to do, the operating system and everything. That's like the nuclear DNA. And that's those 23 pairs of chromosomes. You get half from mom, half from dad. It tells you how fast you're going to go white. And if you're videotaping, I started going white at 25. How tall you're going to be.

• 19:22Chuck Nice?

  I've been trying to go white my whole life.

• 19:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think you mean gray. I think you mean gray.

• 19:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They'll say, "Whoa, I didn't know people... You know, Michael Jackson did that."

• 19:35Speaker 02

  Well, that's true. So, and there's only one copy of that. Now, the battery of your computer gives it the energy. Well, within your cells, you have mitochondria. They are the energy-producing organelles within, and that has its own DNA called mitochondrial DNA. And that actually only comes from the mother. Mother. And there's thousands of mitochondrial copies per cell to that one nuclear. And so where most labs focus on the nuclear DNA, we actually focus on both of those because it's about getting answers. We can use all of those to help include or exclude individuals to support identifications through the DPAA.

• 20:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Before we let you go, because we're going to continue this with your colleague, tell me, I read that Neanderthal DNA, which, you know, were now tens of thousands of years ago, is sometimes, and in some cases, easier to extract than some of the DNA you're obtaining? How's that even possible?

• 20:38Speaker 02

  That's a great question. So, Dr. Marshall, who's the head of my emerging technology, we've partnered with the Max Planck Institute, and we took over some...

• 20:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In Germany, yeah.

• 20:48Speaker 02

  Yep, so we took, we partnered with them and took over some of our chemically-treated, and they do a lot of ancient DNA. But when you think about that Neanderthal DNA, a lot of it is found in caves that are very deep, very cold, very well-preserved at that point. And so when we did the extractions and we looked at the chemical damage and the amount of human DNA, in fact, we were equivalent in damage to 40, 35,000-year-old Neanderthal DNA. But the 20 samples that we took over actually had less human DNA. than the Neanderthal. And what we end up doing is we end up having a lot of bacterial

• 21:28Speaker 02

  DNA. And we have, we've had to figure out methods to enrich for the human DNA. So I tell people to think the way we do that is, you know, when you're walking down the street, if you saw that silver dollar in the rain gutter, you could put a piece of gum on a stick and you could stick it down and pick up that. Well, we developed methods that allowed us to bind specifically the human DNA, and then using those magnets, pulled the human DNA out from the bacterial DNA.

• 21:55Chuck Nice?

  By the way, I just, just will let you know that, uh, we have too much money to be worried about a silver dollar in a drain.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  I don't know about you, I, I, I would.

• 22:06Chuck Nice?

  No, I'm joking. I'm joking.

• 22:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I thought you were better paid than that. Tim, we got to call it quits there. But thank you for joining us in this first of three segments.

• 22:19Chuck Nice?

  Really?

• 22:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're exploring the efforts of the Department of Defense to, to just do right by missing soldiers and those who are otherwise unidentified. So, uh, Tim, Dr. McMahon, thanks for joining us on StarTalk.

• 22:32Speaker 02

  Chuck and Neil, thanks very much for having me. It's been my pleasure. Um, and thanks for telling the story of our families and our fallen heroes.

• 22:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We guarantee this will be seen and heard far and wide. We'll make sure of it because we have power over the universe.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  The pod verse.

• 22:48Chuck Nice?

  The podcaster verse.

• 22:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The podcaster verse. Up next, we're going to be joined by forensic anthropologist Franklin Damon, who will help us delve deeper into the forensic science of it all in the Department of Defense when StarTalk continues.

• 23:14Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm Chris Cohen from Hallworth, New Jersey, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. Please enjoy this episode of StarTalk Radio with your and my favorite personal astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 23:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk. We're talking about forensic science as applied to fallen soldiers in the Department of Defense of the United States of America. And we were introduced to this department I had never heard about, the DPAA. And we've got someone who is the Deputy Director of that laboratory, who is a forensic anthropologist, Dr. Franklin Damon. Dr. Damon, welcome to StarTalk.

• 24:05Speaker 04

  Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

• 24:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in that first segment, I think you might have eavesdropped on it, we made a quick mention of the USS Oklahoma. Could you just tell me, give me a little more details about what went on there? Because I thought that they were going to leave the fallen sailors, Navy personnel, entombed in the Oklahoma, and that itself would be the burial site. So when did that change, or did I not remember that correctly?

• 24:37Speaker 04

  No, you are correct. It's been a standard Navy policy that the ship goes down. That is their final resting place. It's with the ship. You see that with USS Arizona, it's a memorial out at Pearl Harbor.

• 24:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 24:49Speaker 04

  You know, the USS Oklahoma was a little bit different, in the sense that for four years after that ship capsized, there were salvage operations. So salvage divers would go in underwater into the ship, trying to find what they could. What they could find, they buried in one of two temporary cemeteries. It was the policy at the time that we're not, the government is not going to fight a global war and also identify and repatriate the fallen soldier to the families. That would take place after the war. And so at the conclusion of World War II, those two temporary cemeteries were exhumed,

• 25:31Speaker 04

  and there was a laboratory, a central identification laboratory out at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, where they attempted to segregate these remains, right? It's dark, and the ship is capsized, there's oil everywhere, they're just moving by feel to try to find what they can find.

• 25:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, just to be clear, Second World War was a segregated army. So, the way you're using the word throws me a little bit. You meant to, you meant separate out the remains from other things that could contaminate the remains.

• 26:02Speaker 04

  That is correct. Here we have 429 sailors and marines that died on that ship. And after four years, there were, what became skeletonized remains became commingled is the word that we use. Mixed with one another.

• 26:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go. There you go. And, and that cemetery, was it known in advance that you would exhume what was buried there?

• 26:24Speaker 04

  Well, no, so that they did their best to identify what they could. Identified 35 soldier service members at that time.

• 26:32Chuck Nice?

  So can you, before you go any further, because when, when you talk about the forensics of it, what is the, um, kind of like regular investigative identification? How, how's that done? Because 35, what makes you, if you're saying there's this commingling, how do you know that this 35 is indeed the 35?

• 26:54Speaker 04

  That's an excellent question. You're picking up on some of us here. There's, um, you know, those 35 IDs were made by dental comparison. So each of these service members has a medical history, has a medical file. And it's really kind of important to understand throughout any of our identification effort is we can be the best forensic anthropologist. Tim can hire the best molecular biologist in his lab, right? Where you can squeeze DNA out of, out of a bone and pull it out with a magnet. But unless they have something to compare it to, if I have a dental pattern in a set of remains, I need that antemortem, that, that in living, you know, you go to the dentist and they record your, your, your restorations, your decay, that's what I need to compare it to the remains to make an ID.

• 27:39Speaker 04

  And those 35 were all dental identifications.

• 27:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If I can, if I can say something more fun, even just fundamental about science, when we make any measurement in the universe, we need reference standards against them. Otherwise, it's just, it's just floating data with no way to even think about it or to interpret it. So I think it's a way more fundamental reality in doing science than even just in this application.

• 28:07Speaker 04

  And that, and that is foundational across all of what we do in this mission, right? We know what we know about a population biology approach, right? I know that if I measure a bone, this bone can tell me how tall a person was because I have a reference data set of people that I know in life, how tall they were, and I know their bone measurements, right? So it's kind of a juxtaposition of knowing the population biology and then layering in all of these different data points to then tease out what is an individual from a population.

• 28:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's the anthropologist in you, right?

• 28:44Speaker 04

  It is, indeed.

• 28:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. And so, so just remind me again, just the military practice, because the Oklahoma did not sink, it came under a different category from ships that do.

• 28:56Speaker 04

  Because these were buried in, they ultimately ended up in the National Cemetery, the National Memorial Cemetery in the Pacific at Punchbowl in Hawaii. And because those were in the cemetery, I think it made it a little easier to justify. You also had, one of the other really cool things about what we do in the government as scientists is it's the kind of the apply, application of science to public, right? It's public science in a way, in that we're doing this to meet a policy. We're doing it to meet a statute or law. And, and here, when you have families, family groups that have demonstrated significant interest and desire

• 29:37Speaker 04

  to have these cases exhumed and analyzed and individually identified, I think carries a significant amount of weight in our, in our mission.

• 29:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm. Of course, definitely. And so, just to make, just to be clear, missing in action...

• 29:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is often the person is presumed dead, correct? So, but the, but the family doesn't know for sure. And so even if they're confirmed dead, they want to be able to at least have some kind of ceremony or burial ritual to bring closure to this, this unknown. Is that a fair characterization of what, what role you're playing in this, in this, in this journey from soldier to memorial?

• 30:25Speaker 04

  I think that's absolutely fair. I, I think when you, it's in our mission statement when we say accounting for, to account for a missing person, but really we're talking about telling their story. Like who was that person and then providing that family, the primary next of kin, the information about their loss. Even if we can't get ever to an identification of somebody, that's just not going to happen. We still have information and research that our historians have produced and investigations and multiple attempts and trying to do field archaeological recoveries. And all of that information is, is valuable to the family who's just looking for anything.

• 31:05Chuck Nice?

  So with, with respect to the story being told, and I hope this isn't too morose, is there any other information that the identification might be able to divulge as a part of that story? Like I read something about Machu Picchu where, you know, they buried bones inside of these tombs inside the mountain and they pulled, they pulled the bones out and they realized that the diet of corn like rotted most people's teeth because it's very high in sugar. But I mean, is there, do there, people want to know like, you know, injuries?

• 31:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, Chuck, it was the candy bars in the machine at the commissary.

• 31:48Speaker 04

  The one that came down.

• 31:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's something a Gary Larson comic actually does.

• 31:56Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 31:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 31:57Chuck Nice?

  But are there any other stories that can be told?

• 32:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The forensic story, the cause of death, what?

• 32:03Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 32:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, sure.

• 32:04Chuck Nice?

  That's what I'm trying to say, the cause, those, those, those markers.

• 32:08Speaker 04

  Yes, I think that's a really, uh, there's a really cool connection between what our historians do and our researchers as they're looking into like who's missing, over 80,000 that are missing from, from World War II to our wars in Iraq. They're the ones who were charged with doing the research to find out who they are, where were they last known to be alive, what, what information do we have about them? And a lot of the time they're looking at primary source documentation, secondary source of published books about engagements and battles. And when you can marry that information, historical information, secondary source against what comes through the lab, what is recovered? Who gets identified? Maybe you're identifying a guy who historically was said they were way up north, right?

• 32:53Speaker 04

  But yet their body was found and we have proven the medical certainty that they were down here. You in a way can contribute to the re under, to rewriting or understanding engagement, right? The battle and how the movements of people and time and space.

• 33:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So does this go back to the Civil War? Because a lot of battle, you know, a lot of burial sites and battlefields, because they, I think that was just before they could move a dead body without it, you know, putrefying to, to its back home. So you're buried on the spot. So that's, is that part of the mission statement that you're undergoing here?

• 33:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, so our, so the mission that's in statute, we're really looking from World War II to the Iraq wars. But the, the, the logistics, like the moving a body, um, it had always been the policy up until the Korean War, uh, that it was called, uh, you know, temporary intermittent, you know, bury that temporary cemetery after a war, we'd come back and, and exhume you and identify you. In fact, it was World War II, there was a massive program that was called Return of the Dead program that picked up in 45. It was in fact, a curator at a place you may have some familiarity with, the American Museum of Natural History, who received a letter from the quartermaster general of the army who was responsible and said, okay, now the war's over.

• 34:17Speaker 04

  I need help. I don't know what to do.

• 34:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay, okay. Interesting.

• 34:22Speaker 04

  Under invitation from the army, Harry Shapiro went over to Europe, uh, looked at some of the battlefields, looked at what was going on and said, you know, I think you need to hire a bunch of anthropologists. And so in Europe, they had European anthropologists working in Strausberg. In Hawaii, you had a fellow by the name of Charles Warren, who was one of the first anthropologists working for the government in fulfillment of this mission.

• 34:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so, okay, so that's a reminder that when you're on the frontier of what is known and unknown, you have to sort of invent solutions that previous people hadn't thought of, right? And so it sounds so obvious today that, of course, you'd bring in anthropologists because they think about this stuff all the time. But in the service of these military projects, uh, that would have been a major point of advance in terms of our understanding of what's necessary.

• 35:15Speaker 04

  It did. And, and that policy changed. As I was halfway through the Korean War, they realized, hell, we could do a much better job identifying these guys if I got them back to a mortuary sooner.

• 35:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got it, got it.

• 35:25Speaker 04

  And so that's when you have these to start up in Korea and, and do concurrent return is the policy. And that's what we've been doing ever since. That's what takes place, you know, in Iraq and Afghanistan.

• 35:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what's the best, if you were to rank environments in which if you were to exhume a body, uh, it, it's like the best environment for full recovery? Is it the desert? Is it the jungle?

• 35:48Speaker 04

  The tundra?

• 35:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The, the tundra, is there? No, I, no, I, I, let me answer. I know the best one. A glacier. Freeze you in a glacier.

• 35:57Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. Iceman.

• 35:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Iceman. That's the only one I know. But, uh, any, anything else you guys say, great, good news, they're in a bog or whatever. So what, what does an anthropologist say about this?

• 36:10Speaker 04

  Well, you're right in the sense that, uh, you're looking for environments that don't change much. Right, you know, in the earlier segment, we talked about Neanderthal DNA. You heard about Neanderthal DNA in these caves where it's constant temperature, moisture. And that does well for preservation of organic material. One of the complicating factors in our mission is that we weren't necessarily fighting in bogs or glaciers. We do have cases that take us out to glaciers, aircraft losses, but a lot of them are airplane crashes and skirmishes that take place in your, you know, the way in which the death event occurs has a significant impact on what we can actually recover.

• 36:53Speaker 04

  You know, if it's a Vietnam era jet aircraft as opposed to a tank loss or a ground loss in Europe in World War II.

• 37:00Chuck Nice?

  Well, that's the question. What, what is the bare minimum that you would need in order to make an identification?

• 37:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, when we think of DNA, is it like a single strand? Is it, you know, a molecule? I mean, how many, you know, how many molecules, DNA molecules do you need?

• 37:19Speaker 04

  Most of our work does require DNA analysis. And if, if evidence comes into the lab and I have a large enough sample that I can submit, we will. And if it's successful, we can make an ID. And so right now, we're shooting for at least a minimum of two grams of hard, compact coracal bone that we can send.

• 37:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to remind people, two grams is not very much, all right? That's like a tiny fraction of an ounce.

• 37:46Speaker 04

  That would, it's about the size of your, the, the end of your thumb.

• 37:50Chuck Nice?

  Wow. That's insane.

• 37:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, if we, if we had a tooth, we'll pull the organic material from the inside of a tooth and send just milligrams of, of powder.

• 38:02Chuck Nice?

  And what is the best material to receive?

• 38:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The person walks in and dies on the spot, and then you can identify them.

• 38:10Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, well, yeah. And, and they have their wallet on them and they tell you their name.

• 38:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And their ID and their dog tag.

• 38:16Chuck Nice?

  And their social security.

• 38:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, then we good here, we good here.

• 38:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, you want something that's been that's been pretty well preserved, right? That's been in a pretty stable environment that has large enough samples that you can send off for DNA. When you're talking about individual bone types, a lot of it has to do with the in lab molecular techniques that they use to prepare bone. You want to make sure you remove as, you know, bone is a living tissue, right? It's always gets constantly turning over, it's constantly changing. And it's porous. And so when it sits in the archaeological context, it's taking on those things like microbes and fungi and all kinds of other decomposers that are out there. And you want to be able to clean that off as best you can. And so usually we're talking about those hard, compact bone.

• 39:05Speaker 04

  So your femur, your upper leg bone, some of the internal structures of the cranium, your head, tend to be right around the ear, the inner ear area.

• 39:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, okay.

• 39:17Chuck Nice?

  And now that you said that about the conditions, it just reminded me of the best place to gather that information, and I learned this from Neil, the moon.

• 39:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What are you talking about, the moon?

• 39:31Chuck Nice?

  Because you said that there are no microbes to actually

• 39:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:35Chuck Nice?

  decompose a body.

• 39:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct, correct, that's right. Yeah, if you're in a place that's not organic, there's nothing, there's no organic decomposition of you, right? It'll just sort of stay there. It might, you know, desiccate, but yeah, definitely. But I don't think the DOD is worried about bodies on the moon, Chuck.

• 39:52Chuck Nice?

  Not according to my conspiracy theories.

• 39:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That means it's time to take a break. And when we get back, when we get back, more with Dr. Franklin Damon, and we'll get deeper into his lab and find out what are the methods, tools, and tactics that he engages on this edition, this military edition of StarTalk.

• 40:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk. I'm here with Chuck Nice. Still tweeting at ChuckNiceComic?

• 40:39Chuck Nice?

  Yes, thank you, sir.

• 40:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and I noticed that your Brain Games series dropped on Nat Geo Channel. And actually, you find that through Disney, I guess, correct?

• 40:51Chuck Nice?

  Disney Plus, if you have Disney.

• 40:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Disney owns everything, so just go to Disney, you'll find whatever you're looking for.

• 40:55Chuck Nice?

  And now they own me.

• 40:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, all right. I'm slowly binging them, if that's possible. But it's always good to see what our human shortcomings are in our capacity to think and interpret reality that's sitting blatantly in front of us.

• 41:13Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, and I'm just the guy to bring you that.

• 41:18Chuck Nice?

  You wanna know shortcomings? That's where I'm a Viking.

• 41:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, in this episode, we're talking about the challenges and the triumphs of identifying fallen heroes who were unknown, who we only have fragments of their bodies, DNA perhaps, but not always. And we've got Dr. Franklin Damon, who works for the Defense Prisoner of War and Missing in Action Accounting Agency. And so, Dr. Franklin, could you just walk us through the bureaucratic sequence of what happens before a loved one or a family member is notified of your success?

• 42:02Speaker 04

  I certainly can do, and it's, you know, the 80,000 who are missing from World War II to the wars in Iraq. There are a couple of ways in which we find evidence and get it into the laboratory. Really, it starts with our model is researchers and analysts go find out who's missing. That launches a team out to do an investigation, talk to witnesses. "Hey, what do you know? Did you see a plane crash here 30, 40 years ago?" "Yeah, it's right here." That leads into either an excavation of a site if you're out in the jungle somewhere on the side of the Aix-Aube Valley in Vietnam, or if you're looking into remains that the government already owns in a national cemetery somewhere across Europe where they were recovered. They attempted ID, but they couldn't do an ID. They're buried under a headstone that says "unknown."

• 42:46Speaker 04

  We have all of those records. And what can we do today with our science today to put a name to that set of remains? Once that happens, it comes into the laboratory and that's when our laboratory procedures take place. We have a lab out in Hawaii, a main lab in Hawaii. We have one here in Nebraska and we've got about 150 staff working this mission and everything from anthropologists and dentists, data scientists, forensic chemists, doing the work to combine as much information as possible about a set of remains so that a group of case coordinators can look at who's missing and try to match up that postmortem information that's collected,

• 43:31Speaker 04

  what we call in the blind. So they know nothing about a case as it comes in and they just look at the evidence and produce their report and their information and then another set of people look at it and match it up against who's missing. And that's when our medical examiner says, yes, everything matches up and this is this person beyond any other reasonable possibility.

• 43:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you get the military person that goes to the door and rings the bell, I mean, that we see in movies. I mean, how do you notify the kin, the kinfolk?

• 44:01Speaker 04

  Once the medical examiner makes the identification, that notification goes to the respective service casualty officer. So if it's Army, goes to Army, Navy goes Navy. That service casualty officer in turn is the responsible party for communicating to the family. Within 24 or 48 hours, they'll initiate a phone call to say, hey, we now have identified the remains of your relative. And that then leads into a series of conversations about, you know, where they're going to be buried, when they want to be buried, and everything kind of is back planned from there.

• 44:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is like one of the most collaborative projects I've ever heard of in anything. I mean, the chemist, the biologist, the medical doctor, like you said, the dentist, the anthropologist, and the historians. This is a brilliant use of academic resources and as an academic, fundamentally, I think this is a beautiful, beautiful reality you have created.

• 44:59Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, the only thing that's missing is David Caruso from CSI Miami.

• 45:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, but what he's saying is way harder than anything CSI has ever had to tackle. I'm looking at CSI now, you all got it easy. Let me change channels.

• 45:12Chuck Nice?

  I know. You guys make this.

• 45:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They should have their own TV show. No, we need the DPA TV show. Oh my gosh.

• 45:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, CSI is like the romper room of what you.

• 45:23Chuck Nice?

  Those guys are like, they're like kindergarten.

• 45:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we got the body. He was shot right here on this street corner. You know, I got, what do we have on these guys?

• 45:32Chuck Nice?

  You look at these guys, you're like, what do you want, a cookie? God, everything was already done for you.

• 45:36Speaker 04

  It's called, we call it the CSI effect, right? And it's actually a real thing that we contend with and talking to families and trying to get them to understand that sometimes it's not always so easy. Doesn't happen in the 45 minutes and there are no commercial breaks.

• 45:49Chuck Nice?

  So the, so people are actually biased by the fact that they watch this kind of representation of the science and technology play out in this tiny little short period of time.

• 46:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, I believe so.

• 46:02Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 46:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And everybody's, and everybody's young and good looking and you know, the whole thing is what?

• 46:08Speaker 04

  Aren't we?

• 46:12Chuck Nice?

  I was waiting for it.

• 46:14Speaker 04

  That one was too, that was too easy.

• 46:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was too easy. So, so I'm intrigued by what role the, the moving frontier of AI and, and machine learning and big data might play in your work because that's, that, that stuff changes weekly, right? And if you want to take full advantage of it, somebody in your office needs to be tracking that. So what role does that play now? And what role do you see that can play for the future?

• 46:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, we're just beginning to scratch the surface of it. And I think it's going to be huge for us as we continue to move forward. Really, right now, we're just doing very simple, simple, what do I call simple AI, I think is referred to normally where we're just looking to automate boring tasks that you would normally have an anthro, you know, I've got a board certified forensic anthropologist that's working. And if they're spending a lot of their time just messing around with an Excel spreadsheet and playing with data, you know, that's not, that's not really living up to their, what they went to school for. And it's my job to put them in front of the bench on the table, working with the remains. And I can have my data scientists work with these spreadsheets to automate some of the work. An example of what we've done, we've talked about

• 47:23Speaker 04

  the USS Oklahoma. When those, I think there were 62 graves that were exhumed and they came here into the laboratory, first thing we do is a full inventory. So that's just write out every bone that comes in. We had over 13,000 individual bone specimens that came into the lab that we needed to segregate into individuals from a commingled assemblage, back into, you know, what is one person?

• 47:51Speaker 04

  When I got here in 2015, we were walking around with clipboards and a government Skillcraft pen, collecting our inventory, which made it awfully difficult to do any downstream work with. And so through our partnership initiative that DPAA was allowed to do, we worked with University of Nebraska at Ohio and the College of Information Science and Technology and built a database that allows us to, multiple users use it, we've got standards, it's cloud-based, the data that goes in gets peer-reviewed within the system, and we've got security layers over the top of it.

• 48:32Speaker 04

  And the nice part is because it's standardized, we can then work with the data in a very simplified way, where I can search and filter and start looking at, pulling that data out and say, take all of my 13,000 specimens that are in this space and put them in this graphical space, and then let me look at relationships and associations between left bones and right bones. And if I take my standard measurements across one bone, we're all pretty symmetrical, right? Bilaterally, left to right, we're all, as humans, we're pretty symmetrical.

• 49:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On the outside.

• 49:06Speaker 04

  Right. Mostly on the inside, too.

• 49:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, mostly, but you have one pancreas and one liver.

• 49:14Speaker 04

  You're right.

• 49:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And one heart, but yeah.

• 49:17Speaker 04

  Right, right, right. And so we can look at automating the comparison. So if I have, traditionally, if I'm looking at an upper arm bone onto the left and I need to compare it to 300 rights, I mean, I have to do that like 1 to 300, but I have to do it 300 times because I've got 300 lefts to go at, and it takes an analyst like a full week to do that work. But if I have the measurements and I can run them through my automation software, I can focus on the tails, the people that are excluded, right? And just focus on those 20, and my analyst can do those in a morning. But we also are moving into 3D technology, surface scanning, looking at, you know, everything so far is just two dimensional measurements, looking at linear measurements,

• 50:00Speaker 04

  but now we're looking at actual surface models.

• 50:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Volumetric, yeah, excellent. And what is the clavicle method? I've read about that.

• 50:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, so that's something, you know, we're looking at x-ray comparisons. That's all we're doing. We're looking at post-mortem, after death, to pre- anti-mortem, before death, images. And much like you go to the dentist and you would have a dental x-ray, we have the same thing from these service members, except they're not teeth or clavicles, you're collarbone. Right, we have service members in the 40s and 50s would show up to these medical clinics and have chest x-rays taken to look for tuberculosis, right, are you fit for service?

• 50:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so you got the, you got the clavicle for free?

• 50:39Speaker 04

  So we've got the-

• 50:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Out of, out of that data set?

• 50:41Speaker 04

  So here's our, here's our massive data set of anti-mortem chest radiographs that we have access to. And not only do we have access to them, because it's the military, there's a very particular technical manual that defines how you're supposed to take that image. So you know exactly how far they are away from, you know, the subject from the capture device, how they're standing, all of that information, and we can recreate that. So we go out and we exhume an unknown, we have the bones of the neck and we have the collarbones, and we can position them into a couple of different triage, or a couple of different positions, and we can take an x-ray. And then what we do is we take the x-ray against maybe our list of five people we think it could be, and we start looking for pattern matches, right?

• 51:25Speaker 04

  I'm looking at the densities, the opacity within the x-ray itself, to see where am I finding or excluding someone from, from that match to the remains.

• 51:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, this sounds like, you know, we already have face recognition software, so now we just need clavicle recognition software, and then you can automate that, you know, just fine.

• 51:45Speaker 04

  We have, part of the original research development was to look at all of these anti-mortem x-rays and look at how unique the shape is, just the shape of the shaft of the clavicle, not even the, the part where it comes in.

• 51:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Didn't know that, didn't know that.

• 51:57Speaker 04

  And that, and that is, we can run an automated search that returns, you know, your top 10 hit list of like who, who this possibly could be based off of the shape of your clavicle.

• 52:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, the clavicle is not the strongest bone in the body. In fact, I, I, I used to wrestle, and in high school, I actually broke a guy's collarbone. I took him down in a takedown pin. There's some takedowns that are also a pin maneuver when you hit the mat.

• 52:24Chuck Nice?

  What high school did you go to? Cobra Kai?

• 52:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cobra Kai High School?

• 52:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sweep the leg.

• 52:33Chuck Nice?

  Sweep the leg?

• 52:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, but when it cracked, the whole room heard it. It was like, there it is in his body. And like, it was like, oh my gosh, like, what just happened? So, but I have this relationship to the collarbone that I didn't really want to have. So that's why I'm a little more sensitive to what you're describing for it.

• 52:56Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, you think you're sensitive. You should see the guy you broke his leg.

• 53:00Speaker 04

  Having broke my own once as a child, it's not a fun experience now.

• 53:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Well, so we got to land this plane safely, I hope. Can you tell us, what can we expect in the next five years, 10 years? Based on your crystal ball read of the science, the direction science is going? And also geopolitical cooperation in this exercise seems to be paramount.

• 53:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, two totally different questions there. I'll hit the innovation one first and where we're going. I think the biggest thing that we've got going on right now in our research area and what we're looking to validate is the use of stable isotopes as tracers. You know, and this is, you know, we're looking primarily at carbon, carbon 12, 13, looking at ratios that we're finding in remains in order to differentiate on whether somebody is of a possible US origin or not. And is this something that I need to send off to Dr. McMahon and Afton to run a DNA sample? Or is it one that I need to be concerned about because it's not part of our mission set?

• 54:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, in my field, isotope ratios are everything. When we have a rock, a meteorite that doesn't match other meteorites in the asteroid belt that we can trace them to, and someone went into a pocket of air inside of it. And notice that the isotope ratios of the gas equal the what you find in the atmosphere of Mars. And it became the first unambiguously Martian identified meteorite because of isotope ratios. So I my people know full well the power of isotope ratios. So the power to you as you bring that to your field.

• 54:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's, you know, it's all based on what you eat, right? What we figured out many years ago, the chemists and the C three, C four plants and and how the carbons are being incorporated. Um, well, one question I have for you, everything that we're, we're doing here is, is tied to what is known in the ratios here on Earth. You know, and I guess your comment, um, what are the, what do we know of the isotopic ratios of 12 and 13 and other stars or planets?

• 55:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, there's some places where there's only carbon 12 and carbon 13 is extremely rare. But in your case, there are other isotope ratios that changed in the era of, of nuclear weaponry.

• 55:27Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 55:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so if you were in a place and a time, there's certain in your bones and your calcium, there you have different ratios than if you were in a different place at a different time.

• 55:38Speaker 04

  Plus it's glowing.

• 55:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The first, first indication you were at a nuclear bomb test.

• 55:45Speaker 04

  And, and that's how we're using them as tracers. Exactly. Yeah.

• 55:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, no, so wow. So that's a, that's a very fertile field. It sounds like you're just beginning to, to tap into. So, uh, so how about there now, tell me just geopolitically how this, how that works?

• 56:01Speaker 04

  Our mission requires that we interface with other nations. Um, there are about 46, 50 different nations that we deal with and are work with, I shouldn't say deal with, but we have proper cooperative relationship on a daily basis. Um, you know, and I think that's, you know, part of our, our mission set that doesn't really get mentioned of much is the geopolitical relationships that, that we are able to establish through this mission. Um, in fact, it was, um, uh, one of our, our former, former president and his interactions with North Korea and the four points that were raised, the fourth, fourth point there was this mission and turning over, uh, remains of missing US service members, uh, that were in possession of the North Koreans.

• 56:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is, this is hopeful and plus what it tells us is even where, where relations might be tense, there's a deeper humanity in what it is you do that perhaps you, we'd like to believe at least permeates all nations of the world.

• 57:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a, I like to think of it as, is exactly in those terms, right? That I'm a human, we're all humans, we all have basic core needs and beliefs and, you know, I'm a, I'm a son, I'm a husband, I'm a, I'm a brother and, and so are they and so are the folks that we, we talk to and work with and it makes it easy to understand, I think.

• 57:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Dr. Damon, it's been an honor to have you on this program, representing such an important branch of what is going on at the Department of Defense that, that hardly anybody knows about. I mean, I, I didn't know about it, but I don't know that I should be my representative, I don't know, of, of the knowledge base of Americans and of this world, but to the extent that we couldn't get people to see and hear this podcast, we will do it. I've always been a big fan.

• 57:57Speaker 04

  Likewise.

• 57:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Dr. Franklin Damon, thank you for your time. And how do we find out more about your, is there a webpage that we can go to for the DPAA?

• 58:12Speaker 04

  Absolutely. DPAA.mil and we also have a page on Facebook, a new Twitter account as well.

• 58:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But not yet TikTok. Okay, you gotta work on that. Get the young'uns involved. Yeah, I'll, I'll call your people, we'll, we'll figure out what, what we can do there.

• 58:32Speaker 04

  Excellent.

• 58:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, again, thank you, Dr. Damon. Chuck, nice, always good to have you, man. Always a pleasure. All right, I am Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. As always, bidding you to keep looking up.