[MSN] The Tales Pollen Tells. The rise of forensic palynology, a once obscure science may give answers about the origin of Greek statue achieved for the Getty Museum by Marion True.

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The Tales Pollen Tells
The rise of forensic palynology, a once obscure science.

 
For more on this fascinating subject, visit the Web site of University of
Western Australia palynontologist Lynne Milne at: http://tinyurl.com/39nxd4.

 
 In 1988 Marion True, at that time the J. Paul Getty Museum's antiquities
director, paid a record $18 million for a 5th century BC Greek statue that
she said would become "the single greatest piece of classical art in our
collection." It is still one of its most prized artifacts. Almost 20 years
later, True is on trial in Rome for trafficking in looted art, and her
conviction or release may hinge on an analysis of the pollen found in the
folds of the excavated statue's robes. If the pollen is of Sicilian origin,
it may have been looted from a site there after Italy's 1939 prohibition on
exporting antiquities without a permit. But if it is of North African
origin, where similar statues have been found, there is no problem. 

Viewed under the microscope, pollen grains have an endlessly diverse variety
of forms. The shell of pollen grains is highly resistant to degradation, so
pollen grains can fossilize, and are used to track and date geological
strata. They can also be used in tracking and solving crimes and other
puzzles. 

During the massacre of Bosnians in and around Srebrenica in the summer of
1995, one execution and burial site was in a field of wheat. Later, the
bodies were dug up and reburied in smaller numbers elsewhere, to diminish
the evidence for a massacre. Their origin was traced to the wheat field
through the presence of distinctive pollen in soil recovered from them. This
finding was important court evidence against those involved in the
Srebrenica atrocities. 

Between 1975 and 1978, after the end of the Vietnam War, a story emerged
from the Hmong tribesmen who live in the hills bordering Laos and Cambodia,
of a so-called yellow rain alleged to have fallen from the sky, often after
planes had passed over. The "rain" caused heavy bleeding from the nose and
gums, blindness, tremors, seizures, other neurologic symptoms, and death. It
led to serious allegations of chemical warfare by the United States against
the Soviet Union, which was supposed to have supplied chemical weapons to
the Vietnam government. 

Samples of yellow spots on leaves were submitted for chemical analysis and
initially gave positive results for mycotoxins, fungal poisons that can
cause a variety of symptoms and, in the long run, liver cancer. But this
result was unreproducible. Eventually, microscopic analysis showed that the
yellow spots were bee feces containing tree pollen. A swarm of bees had
erupted from a tree-top hive, like a bucket brigade carrying out the slops,
dumping them all over the neighborhood. This new finding for apiology [study
of bees] was confirmed by actual observation in the hill forest by
entomologists, who were caught in a yellow fecal shower during a field trip
to the location of an alleged attack. It strains credulity that Russian
chemical warfare agents went around harvesting tree pollen in large
quantities to disguise a mycotoxin weapon. 

In 1999, at a conference of the Missouri Botanical Society, a pollen
specialist with the Israel Antiquities Authority reported that pollen spores
found on the Shroud of Turin were typical of those of plants growing around
Jerusalem. A Swiss police criminologist, who had earlier been in trouble for
faking evidence, had given the samples of the shroud to him, thus leaving
the finding in doubt. 

The late Andy Spielman of Harvard University, a highly respected medical
entomologist, had a bee in his bonnet about pollen and malaria. He claimed
that the recent large increase in malaria transmission in parts of
sub-Saharan Africa was linked to the increase in the cultivation of maize in
those areas. Huge quantities of pollen produced by the crop settle on the
mud puddles, which are the preferred breeding sites for the Anopheles
arabiensis mosquito, providing a rich food supply for the larvae and
producing bumper crops of the malaria vector. Many of his associates and
students thought he was a bit unhinged about the subject, but he has been
vindicated by the finding that the large increase in malignant tertian
malaria in parts of Ethiopia is in fact correlated with the intensification
of maize cultivation. 


Thus the lowly pollen grain has shown its utility in the fields of
archaeology, criminology, biowarfare investigation, and epidemiology, far
beyond its primary purpose of acting as simply the transmitter of DNA from
one plant generation to the next. Remember that, the next time you curse
pollen for your spring allergy or for messing up the shine on your
automobile. 


Woodall is former director of the Nucleus for the Investigation of Emerging
Infectious Diseases in the Institute of Medical Biochemistry at Brazil's
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. 

jwoodall at the-scientist.com  

http://www.the-scientist.com/