During his meeting with VAST President Chau Van Minh, and Director of the Vietnam Office for Seeking Missing Persons (VNOSMP) Le Cong Tien, the US ambassador highlighted the productive cooperation between VAST, and the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) on improving Vietnam’s capability to identify remains from the war under the US Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Identification of Human Remains project.
As part of this USD7.40 million project, ICMP has been working on developing a modified nuclear-DNA extraction technology to address Vietnam’s challenges with heavily degraded remains samples.
Through ICMP, USAID plans to equip a lab at CDI with advanced DNA equipment, techniques, and materials, enabling the center to successfully extract usable DNA from highly degraded Vietnamese bone samples.
Speaking at the meeting, Ambassador Marc Knapper said that he was pleased to reaffirm the unwavering commitment of the US in supporting Vietnam’s commendable efforts to identify human remains from the war and reuniting identified remains with their family members.
"We stand side by side with Vietnam, acknowledging the profound importance of providing answers to families who have endured decades of uncertainty,” he said.
USAID’s Identification of Human Remains project aims to improve Vietnam’s DNA analysis capabilities and help the country develop a comprehensive system for matching DNA from highly degraded remains with the DNA from families searching for loved ones.
