Major DNA effort launched at Giồng Riềng | Vietnam Today

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]as we look at efforts of searching for remains more than 50 years after the war ended.

[00:00:06]>> Chang now more than 50 years have passed but Vietnam is still searching for the identities of hundreds of thousands of fallen soldiers at Zong Xang Mart cemetery in Azang province. A new effort is now underway to help bring some of those names home. The project is part of Vietnam's national 500 days and nights campaign ahead of the 80th anniversary of Mother's Day in 2027. Nearly 1,000 sets of unidentified remains are being sampled for DNA analysis using next generation sequencing. The most advanced technology available for identifying highly degraded human remains.

[00:00:44]>> We are heading to Rome, a rural district in Anzang Province. In history, it was a part of the logistics routes linked to the war of the southwest battlefield.

[00:00:57]One of the largest matter cemeteries in the south region of Vietnam and has become a focal point in the national efforts to identify unknown fallen soldiers. Right next to me is the grape site of a unknown martr. And as you can see there is no name, no information.

[00:01:19]And behind me are 962 grave signs carrying the same inscription. And for decades, identifying unknown matters has been one of Vietnam's greatest forensic challenges. The challenge is not the lack of determination. It is science.

[00:01:36]After decades buried in Vietnam's tropical climate, DNA degrades rapidly, [music] making identification extremely difficult. But researchers say a new generation of technology is changing what is possible.

[00:01:52]So the past uh 15 years or so, Vietnam has worked with a kind of DNA that is easy to get out of degraded remains, but is not powerful for identification, particularly when there are hundreds of thousands of people missing. We have now developed techniques for nuclear DNA identification where we get uh we get genetic information from thousands of different locations in the genome which allow us to be absolutely certain of a DNA match even when comparing to a distant family member. And it's only been recently that we've been able to work these techniques out in cooperation with scientists from the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology.

[00:02:39]>> This cemetery is close to a river, so many graves have been exposed to water.

[00:02:44]Even so, we've been able to recover usable DNA from a high proportion of the samples and we're very encouraged.

[00:02:52]>> Scotching sun and the heat cannot slow down the progress uh of all the people involved. The biological samples collected here will later be compared with DNA samples provided by relatives.

[00:03:07]An enormous amount of work lies ahead of them requiring coordination among many different parties. Twing for Vietnam today from Anzang Zungzing Cemetery.