‘Ata’, a six-inch-long mummy, has been a source of intrigue for researchers since the early 2000s, when she was discovered. Now, a recent study seeking to understand Ata’s story using whole genome sequencing has landed in a controversy due to the allegedly illegal and unethical manner in which researchers obtained and handled the skeleton.
In 2003, Óscar Muñoz, scouting for relics in the ghost town of La Noria in the Atacama desert, Chile, came across this tiny, naturally mummified skeleton. It was carefully wrapped in a piece of white cloth and enclosed in a leather pouch, tied up with a piece of purple ribbon.
Its unusual features – an elongated skull ending in a point and enlarged eye sockets – reminiscent of an alien, intrigued extra-terrestrial life enthusiasts, who declared it to be evidence of the existence of life beyond Earth.
The skeleton was complete, despite being only half a foot in length. Apart from an oddly-shaped head, it only had 10 pairs of ribs, as opposed to the usual 12 pairs, and its bones were unnaturally hardened for its age.
The skeleton, nicknamed Ata after the Atacama desert where it was found, made its way to the private collection of Ramon Navia-Osorio in Barcelona. In 2013, Navia-Osorio allowed Steven Greer, the maker of a UFO film called Sirius, to perform X-ray and computed tomography scans on the skeleton. The X-rays revealed that despite being only as long as a human foetus, Ata’s bones were as mature as a six year old.
The research
Greer also provided bone marrow samples from Ata to immunologist Garry Nolan at Stanford University, California, who set out to determine this enigmatic skeleton’s identity. On sequencing the DNA that he and his team extracted with ease from the bone marrow sample, Nolan found that it was indeed human in origin, dashing the hopes of many a ufologist. His research revealed that Ata was a female human foetus – stillborn or dead shortly after birth – with an estimated bone age between six and eight years old.
The latest study built on the findings of Nolan’s preliminary tests. Led by Nolan and Atul Butte, a computational biologist at the University of California San Francisco, the team reconstructed Ata’s genome and looked for variations from the reference human genome.
They saw that Ata was of Chilean descent but with significant European input, indicating that she was born sometime after the European colonisation of South America.
Though they did not carry out radio-dating to determine the age of the skeleton, the team surmised that she was less than 500 years old, as they found fairly large strands of DNA in Ata’s bone marrow. Since DNA strands disintegrate with time, they reasoned that Ata could not be from too long ago. Gizmodo‘s George Dvorsky declared that Ata was, in fact, no more than 40 years old.
The principal finding of the study, published in the journal Genome Research, was that Ata’s genome differed from the reference human genome at over three million positions. The researchers then narrowed it down to 54 variations that would have affected gene function. They noticed that many of these genes were involved with bone development, while yet others seemed completely new.
Results from Ata’s genome, coupled with that from other stillborn deaths, can further our understanding of the process of development and help pinpoint the cause of stillbirth in individual cases, according to a New York Times report.
Illegal and unethical
Shortly after Nolan and Butte published their study last month, Cristina Dorador, a biologist at the University of Antofagasta, wrote a sharp critique of the study and the way in which Ata’s remains had been treated.
She pointed out that since the research involved human remains, Chilean law mandated that the researchers obtain a permit from the National Monument Council. Additionally, the team performed destructive sampling of the skeleton to obtain DNA samples, which made their entire study illegal, she claimed.
The Chilean National Monument Council has ordered an investigation to probe whether Ata’s skeleton was illegally exhumed and sold, reported the New York Times.
“It’s offensive for the girl, for her family, and for the heritage of Chile,” Francisca Santana-Sagredo, a biological anthropologist at the University of Antofagasta and the University of Oxford, told the newspaper.
Dorador also criticised the treatment meted out to Ata despite it being clear that she lived not too long ago, as evidenced by the care with which her remains were wrapped and preserved. She condemned the insensitivity with which the media, the public and the research team treated the death of a child whose parents could still be alive. Thus, she pointed out, the study was unethical apart from being illegal.
Nolan and Butte pleaded ignorance about the origins of the skeleton when confronted with these allegations. In a statement to Gizmodo, the two researchers appreciated the demands that Ata’s remains be sent back to Chile, but added that, “It [the mummy] does not provide identifiable information about a living individual, as defined by federal regulations, and does not qualify as human subjects research, per the Federal Office of Human Research Protections.”
Butte told Carl Zimmer of the New York Times, “We had no involvement or knowledge of how the skeleton was originally obtained nor how it was sold or exported to Spain. We had no reason to suspect in this case that this sample was illegally obtained.”
Dorador disagreed. “If samples are obtained unethically, any resulting science is not ethical, and as such, should not be published.” She added that in these cases, the onus is on the journals to retract such publications.
Hillary Sussman, the editor of Genome Research, admitted that the journal did not instruct authors to disclose ethics-related details and promised to look into such issues in the future.