Vial episode over after precious blood comes home to Elcho Island

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This was published 4 years ago

Vial episode over after precious blood comes home to Elcho Island

By Liam Mannix

On Tuesday, amid dancing and speeches and the soaring voices of the community choir, something precious taken from the remote Northern Territory Galiwin’ku Indigenous community will finally return home.

Manggu. Blood.

Ross Mandi Wunungmurra,  chair of the  Yalu Marnggithinyaraw Indigenous Corporation, in front of two baskets containing the blood.

Ross Mandi Wunungmurra,  chair of the  Yalu Marnggithinyaraw Indigenous Corporation, in front of two baskets containing the blood.Credit: Jamie Kidston

Five decades ago, government health workers drew blood from the people of this community living on Elcho Island off the tip of Arnhem Land – to test for typhoid, they said.

What they did not say was this: we’re keeping the blood.

For the past 50 years, that blood had been subject to repeated scientific experiments without the original donors ever knowing of its existence.

It eventually ended up in a freezer at the Australian National University.

Finally, on Tuesday, the blood will be returned to the community.

“We are looking forward,” says Ross Mandi Wunungmurra, chair of the local Yalu Marnggithinyaraw indigenous corporation, “to welcoming home our ancestors.”

In 1968, a severe typhoid outbreak hit Elcho Island. Government health workers drew blood from about 1200 members of the community to test for the disease.

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Afterwards, rather than dispose of the blood, it was given to science.

It eventually became part of a large research collection held by the ANU’s National Centre for Indigenous Genomics, about 7000 samples collected from Aboriginal Australians in missions and settlements around Australia.

There was a smoking ceremony for the blood samples at the ANU.

There was a smoking ceremony for the blood samples at the ANU.Credit: Karleen Minney

Over the next few decades, scientists used that blood for DNA and molecular experiments, and to hunt for markers of disease.

“It would be wrong to call it wrong,” says Professor Simon Easteal, the centre’s director. “When people did it, they did not know what they were doing might be unacceptable now.”

Institutions around the world hold similar collections of blood and tissue that likely were given without full consent.

It took 20 years for the family of African American Henrietta Lacks to discover her cells had been harvested in 1951 during a routine operation, and were now being grown and used by scientists all around the world. After a long fight, the family eventually won limited control over their ancestor's cells.

The ANU faces similar issues. In some cases, scientists took cells from the blood and grew them in a dish. Those frozen cells are still held by the ANU; no one is quite sure what to do with them.

A few years ago, the ANU decided to ask the communities what they should do about all these old samples.

Indigenous community engagement co-ordinator Azure Hermes flew out to Elcho Island to ask the community the tough question: we have your blood, what do you want us to do with it?

“Based on their culture, blood samples still have a connection to that person," says Ms Hermes. "If they passed away, they were worried about what that meant. Did it mean they hadn’t moved on to the next world? Was this why there was so much sickness in this community, because they were being punished?”

But after further discussion, the Galiwin’ku community also came to believe the blood should make one more scientific contribution before coming home.

The future of medicine is genetic: without the data extracted from DNA, indigenous Australians will miss out.

They gave permission for the ANU to sequence the genetic data from the 1200 samples.

Samples from about 200 community members who have died since 1968 were returned for burial. The rest will be destroyed.

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The blood samples have been packaged into ornate boxes. At a ceremony on Elcho on Tuesday afternoon they will be given to the families of the original donors, who will take them home to bury them on their land.

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