LONG LIVE THE KING: Conspiracy theories about the death of King Albert I of Belgium are being laid to rest thanks to modern genomic technology.© WIKIMEDIA COMMONS/LIBRARY OF CONGRESSIn 1934, King Albert I of Belgium died in a rock-climbing accident at the age of 58. Eighty years later, Belgian TV journalist Reinout Goddyn purchased some bloodstained leaves supposedly collected from the site of the accident after the body was discovered in the middle of the night. He wanted to settle the conspiracy theories that circulated after the king’s death, which no one had witnessed.
In 2014, Goddyn reached out to Dieter Deforce, director of the Laboratory of Pharmaceutical Biotechnology, Forensic DNA, at the University of Ghent, Belgium. “He asked if I could do a DNA analysis to prove if it was the blood of the king or not,” recalls Deforce, who was hesitant to help because doing so would require a sample from one of the king’s relatives. Given ongoing legal proceedings regarding a woman who claimed to be the daughter of King Albert II, Deforce decided to steer clear of Belgian royalty’s genetic data. But he told Goddyn that he could test the bloody leaves to see if the DNA was human or not. Deforce performed genomic and proteomic analyses and demonstrated that the blood from the leaves ...
