If they had not consulted, they might well have got a legal challenge, although I’m hypothesising. They did consult, and they consulted the right people. Now there is clearly no point, it’s fait accompli.

Everything I have read about this persuades me that everyone directly concerned has behaved ethically, correctly and responsibly, and they have got a good outcome which can only be beneficial.

But Mr. Willerslev and his team seem to take the vetoes more seriously than Sandgropper. So I am not so sure whether Sandgropper is telling the truth.

well, sandgropper said that the vetoes are not binding. that makes a big difference. in the USA the situation is more complicated because of nagrpa, which is a legit and legal way that tribal leadership can interpose themselves between researchers and finds. the fundamental weirdness of this though is that some of these native people deny the findings anyway if they happen, so it’s all irrelevant to them (some of the aboriginal’s in the australian shrugged off the findings as a ‘whitefella story’).

What has horrified me most is Mr. Willerslev’s statement that he would have ended the project and left the genome unpublished if the Aboriginal council board had rejected his proposal. This is something unthinkable from a scientific and academic point of view. No person or organization has any right to veto publication of the genetic results of a deceased person with no identifiable legal inheritors. You have made a terrible mistake by asking for the permission of the Aboriginal council for the publication of the genetic results, because by doing that you have set a bad example for future researchers who will try to collect samples from Aboriginals and even from other “indigenous” (indigenousness is an unscientific concept, so I am using the word indigenous in quotation marks) peoples of the world, make their analyses and publish their results. What if various “indigenous” groups try to veto scientific study of deceased “indigenous” individuals from their region with no identifiable living legal inheritors using your appeal for permission as a justification for finding in themselves the right to veto such scientific studies? Have you considered the long-term effects of your decision for the scientific community?

Here is a snippet:

Khan’s arguably very American perspective on this, is that only individual consent can matter. The opinion of tribal councils or any other institutions regarding release of personal genetic information is irrelevant. There is no reason to consult such institutions – only the individual matters. An entirely defensible position. It is certainly the position of the legal community in America and perhaps most of the scientific community. But there are a couple of reasons why the story in this case is a bit more complex. First, as noted in one of the online comments on Khan’s blog, the genome sequenced was from a deceased individual with no identifiable descendants. We could not obtain informed consent from the donor or from his family. In our opinion, the correct thing to do was then to consult with the local representatives of the group to which the donor belong. After considering different options we determined that the Goldfields Land and Sea Council was our best option. Secondly, and most importantly, there is a several hundred year old tradition for exploitation of indigenous people by anthropologists. Anthropologists have repeatedly failed to recognize the rights of indigenous people. This dark historical relationship between indigenous people and anthropologists, makes it particularly important to involve the local indigenous communities in scientific studies. Our approach was to reach out to the local tribal council to work with them in the interpretation and presentation of our results. I strongly believe that is the right thing to do and I hope other geneticists will do the same thing in the future when working on questions relating to indigenous people. I am not advocating granting particular institutions the power to veto studies that individual members of the community consent to, but I would encourage researchers to involve the local community as much as possible. You do that out of respect for the local community and to promote and enable a good relationship between indigenous people and the scientists who wish to learn from them.

I didn’t interrogate you, I just kindly asked you a question. It is fine if you do not answer my question, but don’t expect me to buy your summary of the events that came prior to the publication of the hair DNA results.

I have asked you a serious question.