- 6/9/2025
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00:00this instant changed history it came at the moment when people least expected it now a
00:12revolutionary investigation may change it again the holy grail is finding an answer using ancient
00:19blood from the crime scene itself forensic scientists are on the brink of decoding a
00:24genetic puzzle he held the nation together in the midst of war but was Abraham Lincoln also
00:34fighting a terrible secret foe
00:36the bullet that ended president Lincoln's life
01:06might have also concealed a secret Lincoln may have already been dying when he was killed it's
01:15a mystery a century and a half in the making but new forensic tools could unlock the code that made
01:24Abraham Lincoln who he was his DNA and may even reveal a hidden killer dr. John Sotos has spent
01:37his life researching the medical histories of presidents an expert in obscure diagnoses he is
01:44embarking on a journey to reopen president Lincoln's medical chart since my early days in medical school
01:51school I've been interested in how seemingly mundane observations about a person can yield substantial
01:59clues to a medical condition they might have his first clue that Lincoln may have been ill came from
02:08an image he'd seen a hundred times we've all seen that picture taken just before he died of the emaciated
02:17thin haggard looking Lincoln but somehow I really didn't acknowledge that because that's not what's
02:24on the five dollar bill and it's not what's on the Lincoln penny or in the Lincoln Memorial but when you see
02:29that picture and you read that he had fainting spells in his last three months of life he had cold hands and cold feet he had joked about losing weight a picture of a sicker man starts to emerge
02:44Lincoln Lincoln bore a heavier burden than most presidents but these photos were taken only 13 months apart
02:51Lincoln spent the day of his assassination in high spirits the North's victory was finally assured
02:59part of his elation may have been relief that he had managed to outlast the war
03:06Lincoln himself said that on that Friday five days after we surrender that he felt for the first time as if the war was over
03:14the challenge of uniting the country still lay before Lincoln when a southerner named John Wilkes Booth sought vengeance for the South
03:21John Wilkes Booth
03:28John Wilkes Booth
03:48Somalia
04:03You don't know the manners of a polite society.
04:07Don't know the manners of a good society, eh?
04:10Well, I guess I don't want to turn you inside that old gal.
04:13You can stop apologizing old man-trap.
04:24I don't know the manners of a man-trap.
04:33Stop!
04:42Stop!
04:48Stop right there!
04:51Did he hear a gunshot?
04:53No, it's been shot!
04:56Stop!
04:58Stop!
05:00The great man was alive, but dying of a mortal wound.
05:15Within nine hours, he would be gone.
05:19The culprit was never in question, but the crime may still possess an element of a classic
05:25mystery story.
05:30Agatha Christie, in giving advice on how to write mysteries, she says you conceal the critical
05:36move with a big move, and I think that's what happened.
05:43The big move in Lincoln's case is the assassination.
05:47And the critical move, the state of Lincoln's health, may have been concealed by the tragedy.
05:52Lincoln's physical appearance set him apart.
06:00Every school child knows he was tall, but Sotos thinks his height may be a symptom of
06:05a medical syndrome.
06:08He was very tall, he was very thin, and his head was too small for his body, and his limbs
06:16were very long.
06:20If you put LinkedIn in a room with 20 people, you would pick him out as being physically
06:26different from those other 20.
06:30There are even some recollections from girls who knew him in school.
06:35And they would say he was so ugly that I couldn't go with him.
06:42Pleasant day.
06:46And it's pretty heartbreaking.
06:50Many have pointed to Lincoln's lanky frame as evidence that he suffered from Marfan syndrome,
06:55a genetic disease that causes overlong limbs, poor vision, and heart problems.
07:02But Sotos has come to a different conclusion.
07:06He believes that Lincoln had another deadly hereditary disease, a little-known syndrome
07:11called MEN2B.
07:16To confirm the diagnosis, he turned to Dr. Karis Eng, a geneticist who helped discover
07:22the MEN2B gene.
07:25MEN2B is a very rare, inherited cancer syndrome, where the person will look very tall and lanky,
07:33just as President Lincoln did, and be predisposed to a rare but horrible type of thyroid cancer.
07:41As Lincoln aged, he grew a beard, and in photographs, his shirt collars covered more and more of his neck.
07:49Was he hiding, in fact, a mass?
07:52That's how this type of thyroid cancer presents.
07:55Without a living patient to examine, Dr. Sotos must rely on evidence left behind.
08:16There are 130 surviving photographs of the 16th president.
08:27Sotos believes he spotted an obvious symptom of MEN2B that has been in plain sight all along.
08:36Lincoln had, besides the famous bump actually on this side of his cheek, he had several bumps
08:42on his lips.
08:46The disease stimulates the overgrowth of nerves.
08:49If you look at his blubbery lips, that's something called ganglioneuromatosis, so that's overgrown
08:56nerves.
08:57We all have nerves, that's the way we feel, and that's overgrown, and I think we're seeing
09:03a little bit of that.
09:05MEN2B, like all genetic diseases, tends to run in families.
09:12One of Lincoln's sons, Tad, had a speech impediment that Sotos thinks could have been caused by
09:17rampant bundles of nerves growing inside his mouth.
09:22The most striking thing was that three of his four sons had the same bumps on the lips.
09:29The pictures of the lumps in the children's lips really was too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence.
09:37Those same three sons, Eddie, Willie, and Tad Lincoln all died in childhood.
09:45Only Robert, the son with normal, smooth-looking lips, lived out his life.
09:51Sotos has discovered that Lincoln complained of hands so cold, the fire couldn't warm them.
09:57A classic adrenal cancer symptom.
10:01Dramatic weight loss.
10:04Tell-tale bumpy lips.
10:06A potential family history.
10:10From a distance of 144 years, Dr. Sotos makes a case for diagnosing Lincoln.
10:17But the only way to confirm MEN2B is a DNA test.
10:22Sotos will reopen America's coldest case to try to identify Lincoln's other killer.
10:29We can guess all we like.
10:31We have the technology.
10:32We can prove it now.
10:35Dr. John Sotos is out to prove that our 16th president may have been dying of cancer when he was killed.
10:47But to get an answer, he needs DNA.
10:50No easy quest.
10:53In a Springfield, Illinois cemetery, Lincoln's remains are sealed in a concrete vault,
10:59ten feet underground, in a tomb fit for a king.
11:04The president's been shot!
11:08But there is another possibility.
11:12Lincoln left blood and brain matter at the scene of the crime.
11:16Perhaps his DNA has survived.
11:26Sotos enlists assassination expert Anthony Pitch to help him retrace Lincoln's blood trail.
11:33The street has changed a bit in the years since.
11:35Yes.
11:36It was really run down.
11:37You can imagine it very dimly lit.
11:39This was about 10.30 p.m.
11:41the 14th of April, 1865.
11:43It's me!
11:45It's me!
11:46It's me!
11:47It's me!
11:48It's me!
11:49It's me!
11:50It's me!
11:51It's me!
11:52It's me!
11:54Oh!
11:55It's me!
11:56Oh!
11:57It's me!
11:58Is he going to be alright?
11:59They wanted to go to the nearest private home because the doctor said if we take him over
12:06the bumpy road to the White House, he'll die.
12:10So they took him out of one of these exits and crossed the road very slowly to that little brick boarding house diagonally across from the theater.
12:21And that's where he died nine hours later.
12:40So ultimately he did make the trip from Forrest's Theater to here.
12:59Yes, they had the autopsy in this room right over here.
13:04You see, the room on the second floor is where they had the autopsy on Lincoln's body, which today is the president's family dining room.
13:18In the middle of the autopsy, Mrs. Lincoln sent her close confidant to get a memento.
13:26Mrs. Lincoln wishes a remembrance of the president.
13:30Of course.
13:30This was a practice in those days, and so everybody wanted something of Lincoln.
13:43It's reported that satisfying all of his trusted friends with souvenirs after his death left Lincoln nearly bald on the back of his head.
13:52DNA only resides in a hair's follicle, so a cut lock of hair couldn't help Sotos unless it was coated with blood.
14:01It's quite remarkable that things were so informal that just bits of presidential hair could be dispensed willy-nilly almost.
14:13Well, in the Victorian times, you would preserve relics of a great man, and anything to do with Lincoln instantly became a valued relic.
14:24Americans in the 19th century lived with death.
14:29It wasn't something that took place in an operating room or a remote hospital room.
14:35People lived and died under the same roof, they were buried from home, and in a curious sort of way, I think that probably fed this desire to possess something of the deceased.
14:51It was almost part of the mourning process, and paradoxically, part of letting go was hanging on to something, whether it was a lock of hair or a piece of clothing, or a blood-stained souvenir from the Lincoln assassination.
15:12Lincoln's mortal wound produced many such souvenirs.
15:19Even from the very instant that Lincoln incurred the head wound, it started to bleed, and this uninterrupted bleeding resulted in a number of artifacts, including, for instance, the dress of Laura Keene.
15:33Yes, the lead lady in the play.
15:37It's me!
15:38It's me!
15:39It's me!
15:40It's me!
15:41It's me!
15:42It's me!
15:43It's me!
15:44It's me!
15:45It's me!
15:46It's me!
15:47It's me!
15:48It's me!
15:49It's me!
15:50Oh!
15:51Oh!
15:52Laura Keene cradled the president's head and shoulders in her lap.
16:00So some of the brain tissue and the blood went onto her dress.
16:05Lincoln's head wound bled quite freely for a number of hours.
16:19It soaked two pillows.
16:21Blood got onto the blanket.
16:24There was blood on clothing, bandages.
16:27The surgeons got blood on the cuffs of their shirt.
16:30So there are lots of samples of Lincoln's DNA potentially available.
16:37Assassination relics took on a life of their own.
16:43Ever the leading lady, Laura Keene was even reputed to have modeled her bloody dress at parties.
16:50This was the drama.
16:54This was, I won't say entertainment, but in a sense, pre-television, pre-radio, obviously pre-internet.
17:02What happened?
17:04I think also this was a generation that probably had its sense of history heightened because it had lived through the Civil War.
17:11History had been telescoped in a remarkable way.
17:15As he lay bleeding and dying.
17:18They wanted to hang onto it.
17:20They wanted to have pieces of it.
17:23More than a century and a half after the assassination, people may still be hanging on to legitimate samples of Lincoln's blood.
17:31Sotos just needs to find one.
17:37At the Lincoln Presidential Museum and Library in Springfield, Illinois, priceless Lincoln treasures dazzle half a million visitors a year.
17:48In an underground vault, a collection of Lincoln's presidential papers.
17:53The Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address in Lincoln's own hand are stored.
17:59But on the next shelf, there's something else.
18:06A piece of fabric that may be from Laura Keene's dress.
18:13Oh!
18:15Is it going to be alright?
18:17It was received from Laura Keene herself here in Springfield just a little over a year after Mr. Lincoln was killed.
18:27This artifact could contain Lincoln's DNA.
18:32We have no objection to learning what is in that dress fragment.
18:39But there's a hitch.
18:42There has to be some disturbance to the artifact in order to get the DNA out of it.
18:48We do, of course, completely object to the idea that you would destroy even the smallest part of an object.
19:01Fortunately, other souvenirs claiming to be from Abraham Lincoln's assassination, blood relics as they're known, have survived outside of museums.
19:11As long as Benjamin Coe can remember, his family has possessed fabric said to be from Laura Keene's dress.
19:20Lincoln's been very big in our family all my life.
19:24My great-great-grandmother was a member of a Ladies Soldiers Aid Society and was able to get a piece of Laura Keene's dress.
19:39It was originally going to be a quilt, but it never got put together, but the patches were put in displays and that was handed down through the family, through each generation, until it finally came to us.
19:58The Coe's have come to the Cleveland Clinic to supervise the sampling process.
20:06Ben's daughter, Mary, and grandson, Jesse, want to minimize the extent of damage to their artifact.
20:15I grew up with the Lincoln swatch in my grandparents' house, and it took until a little later for me to realize that, you know, maybe it's not normal to have the blood of a dead president in your grandparents' living room.
20:27That blood may contain the evidence Sotos is looking for.
20:32A single DNA molecule is made up of about three billion individual base pairs, and irregularity or mutation on any one of them can cause a disease.
20:44I always tell my patients that genes are like encyclopedias.
20:48Looking for a mutation or operation is like reading every single page of the encyclopedia looking for that one typographical error.
20:56So this must be stained right here.
20:58Because it's soaked all the way through.
21:00That's a good one.
21:02Okay.
21:03Fortunately, Dr. Eng knows which page and even which paragraph to examine for the MEN2B mutation.
21:10If Lincoln were alive, she could draw his blood and get results in a snap.
21:17But nothing is simple when the patient has been dead for a century and a half.
21:26Okay.
21:27You ready?
21:28That's a good one.
21:32This is number one?
21:33Uh-huh.
21:34Yeah.
21:35From these snippets of fabric, they'll attempt to extract DNA and look for MEN2B.
21:49Look at me.
21:50Great.
21:51Beautiful.
21:52Thank you very much.
21:53This first test will answer the most basic question.
22:08Is there any DNA on the sample?
22:12The peak for DNA should be at 260.
22:16And for good quality DNA, you want it to be around 1.8.
22:21If we see something fantastic, if not, we still proceed.
22:25Proceed.
22:26Yeah.
22:27Okay.
22:28But you can see a little bit of a hump at 260.
22:34What this is over here, it's hard to say.
22:37Most likely, we may be having some DNA there, based on the readings that we're seeing here.
22:46Just 20 years ago, testing for Lincoln's DNA was impossible.
22:51But a new, Nobel Prize-winning process called Polymerous Chain Reaction, or PCR, multiplies genetic
22:59material millions of times, making it possible to study a tiny amount of DNA.
23:07Didn't see any bands yet.
23:10We don't know for sure if there's no DNA, but when we do the second round, the nested
23:15approach, we might see it coming up.
23:17So that's our hope.
23:19By making subtle changes to each element of the test, the team will keep trying to coax DNA
23:25from the sample.
23:26But it's becoming clear that there won't be any easy answers.
23:30All right.
23:31We shall await developments.
23:35Sotos believes Lincoln had MEN2B, but some have suspected the president suffered from an
23:41entirely different condition, Marfan syndrome.
23:45So he's taking the investigation to the University of Pennsylvania's Medical Genetics Clinic to
23:51put this part of the mystery to rest for good.
23:58Dan McAnoff understands the tragic impact of genetic disease.
24:04He's lost his mother, an uncle, and both brothers to Marfan syndrome.
24:09My mother had Marfan, and she had three boys, including me.
24:14We all have it, and my two sons have it as well.
24:21Dan, along with his physician, genetics expert Dr. Reed Piritz, has agreed to help Sotos compare
24:28clinical Marfan symptoms with what is known about Lincoln.
24:33Well, Lincoln, first of all, was striking because of his stature.
24:37Six feet, four inches, quite exceptional for the mid-19th century.
24:44When Lincoln was sitting down, he didn't appear that much taller than the men around the table
24:50with him.
24:51His height and disproportionately long arms and legs mean Lincoln's overall body type fits
24:58the mold for Marfan, though a long and lanky frame is also a key symptom of MEN2B.
25:04If his height were the result of a genetic mutation, it would solve one mystery.
25:11Why Abraham looked so little like his father Thomas.
25:16Their profound lack of resemblance was even used by political rivals to suggest Lincoln's
25:21birth was illegitimate.
25:24But perhaps they looked unrelated because the younger Lincoln's appearance reflected
25:28symptoms of Marfan or MEN2B.
25:33Another big feature of Marfan syndrome is the eyes, of course.
25:37I was diagnosed with Marfan syndrome by an ophthalmologist when I was six years old when
25:43I couldn't see the blackboard in school.
25:45Unfortunately, at the time, they felt that they really needed the eye to develop more before
25:50they did surgery.
25:51So I was essentially legally blind until I was 15.
25:54Lincoln, on the other hand, only wore reading glasses late in life.
26:00We have a pair here that is approximately the same strength as the ones that were found in
26:07his pocket.
26:08And you can see that they're not real strong in terms of the way they bend images.
26:14Right.
26:15And they're certainly much thinner as compared to my glasses.
26:21Lincoln's eyes don't fit the mold.
26:24But could he have had the one symptom nearly everyone with Marfan has in common?
26:29A potentially deadly heart defect.
26:32A tear, called a dissection, can develop at any time.
26:38And that can be immediately fatal.
26:40So aerobic sports and aerobic exercise are good for most people, but they're not good for
26:45people who have Marfan.
26:47This is particularly noteworthy in terms of Lincoln, who was such a vigorous woodsman,
26:56rail splitter during his youth.
26:59Swinging an axe is something that I would mention right up front as an activity to avoid.
27:06You tell your 21st century patients not to pick up an axe?
27:10So, on balance, we're left with a man who was very tall, disproportionately so, but without
27:19eye findings or evidence about the cardiovascular system, I think we have a hard time concluding
27:25that he had Marfan syndrome.
27:27Sotos has built a compelling circumstantial argument against Lincoln having Marfan.
27:33His case for MEN2B, however, still rests on finding DNA.
27:38So far, the Cleveland Clinic team can't seem to zero in on the DNA they need to work with.
27:46So Sotos is trekking halfway around the world, hand-carrying bloody dress clippings,
27:51to try his luck at a lab that specializes in getting good DNA out of bad samples.
27:57So I've traveled 8,000 miles to New Zealand to bring the Lincoln samples to the laboratory
28:08of my colleague.
28:09She's got a lot of experience getting DNA out of old samples, and she's got access to a state-of-the-art lab.
28:14Molecular anthropologist Ann Horsborough makes her living looking back in time.
28:29Most of the work that I do is on the history of prehistoric populations, and so most of the
28:35people I'm investigating are always going to remain nameless and faceless.
28:40Step into it?
28:41Step into it.
28:42So for me, this is a particularly fun project because we're dealing with a named individual
28:47who's been hugely important in world history, and about whom we know quite a lot.
28:53So we're putting this on to keep from shedding DNA in the ancient lab?
28:56Yes, so we're trying to keep out all the modern DNA so it doesn't compete with the ancient
29:00DNA that we're trying to recover.
29:02Well, I'm glad somebody thinks I have good quality DNA.
29:05I think I'm ready.
29:06Okay, now don't scratch your nose.
29:08It's impossible.
29:12Lincoln's DNA is far younger than the prehistoric bones Ann normally works with.
29:17But in the DNA world, anything more than a hundred years old is considered ancient.
29:24DNA starts falling apart as soon as you die.
29:27The rungs of the DNA ladder start getting damaged.
29:30The sides of the ladder along the long strands start falling apart.
29:34So you're not getting the long strings of DNA that you would get out of a nice modern sample.
29:41The little chemicals we added in there over in the ancient DNA lab are the magic chemicals
29:46that allow this amplification process to proceed.
29:49So hopefully we've started from a few molecules of DNA and expanded it up into trillions.
30:00This is the moment of truth.
30:02Okay, let's go look at it.
30:04Drum roll, please.
30:06We have bands.
30:07We have bands.
30:08Bands should confirm the presence of DNA.
30:23Oh my God, we might have six.
30:24Yes.
30:25I am.
30:26No, no, no.
30:27But look, look.
30:28Lane two is higher than eight.
30:29Yeah, but you've got a double loading capacity.
30:30Oh.
30:31Yeah, so you've got more stuff in.
30:32Yeah.
30:33To each of the wells.
30:34But this gives a lot of encouragement for this afternoon.
30:35Oh my God.
30:36You'd only need the slightest fraction of Lincoln to be present.
30:37If it's there, we'll get it.
30:38If it's there, we'll get it.
30:39Science happy dance.
30:41They're seeing evidence of DNA, but is it Lincoln's? Only finding MEN2B will tell them for sure.
31:06Because that mutation is in such low frequency in the general population, we can be pretty
31:13sure that if we recover the mutation, it's because Abraham Lincoln had that particular
31:18mutation, and therefore the disease MEN2B.
31:21The next step is to actually sequence the gene.
31:26First, they attempt to confirm their results.
31:31All right.
31:38But there's no, um...
31:40There's nothing.
31:41There's no prime diamond.
31:42There's no diamonds.
31:43Nothing amped.
31:44No.
31:45But there's not enough there for your pyro sequencing.
31:48Uh, no.
31:50Definitely not.
31:51No.
31:52We just have to try again with different primer pairs, I think.
31:56The results were, as we say, no joy.
32:00Well, that's frustrating.
32:03Completely within the realm of absolutely normal, but frustrating.
32:08The first result may have been a fluke caused by contamination or some other flaw in the test.
32:15We're looking for a very faint radio signal coming to us from 144 years ago, and it's surrounded
32:22by all this noise of other radio signals that we're not actually interested in.
32:26Maybe this is just a case of the reaction not working this time.
32:29Yeah.
32:30So there's a whole series of things that...
32:32This is the way it goes.
32:34It's not that I'm not optimistic.
32:37It's just that any number of things could have happened to the sample since Lincoln died
32:43that we just can't control for.
32:45It could have been stored in a part of a house that's been heating and cooling.
32:51If it's been mounted on acid-bearing paper, acid is going to degrade DNA.
32:56If it's been ironed at all, that's going to rapidly accelerate the DNA degradation.
33:01So there are a lot of forces in action which are going to cause DNA degradation.
33:06Nothing short of ironclad results will convince the community of scholars that know Lincoln best.
33:12I would be very skeptical, after 150 years, that we were to discover that, in fact, Lincoln
33:19was dying, whether of Marfan syndrome or of cancer.
33:24Lincoln was dying of the war.
33:26He said as much, privately, this war is taking the life out of me.
33:35That's what Lincoln was dying of.
33:39John Sotos could be on the brink of proving that Abraham Lincoln was dying of cancer when he was killed.
33:46But he's been thwarted at every turn.
33:49We thought it would be a simple matter to just get some fabric, snip a few threads off, run it,
33:55and the answer would fall from the sky.
33:58That hasn't proven to be the case.
34:01But the tide may be turning.
34:04Back in Cleveland, Todd and Mohamed have made an unexpected breakthrough.
34:08So I'll show you what we got.
34:13Well, we've got a band, anyway.
34:15As you can see, this one is a little bit bigger and a little bit darker.
34:20This is second number six, and that's the one that ended up giving us the band,
34:24as if there was maybe something on there.
34:27At last, they have isolated DNA.
34:30This could be the break they've been waiting for.
34:35The seemingly endless game of trial and error is paying off.
34:42For the first time, Sotos is about to see MEN2B results.
34:48Okay.
34:49There's some lines.
34:54What's going on here?
34:57Okay.
34:58So from the sample that we got, looking at the sequence, what we're looking at first is at this position here.
35:05The A, T, and G, we expect to see changes in this location here.
35:11And this is what you see here.
35:15If you look down the list, you'll see all of them are ATGs.
35:21That means you're not seeing any changes.
35:24Okay, so...
35:25In a word, the DNA is normal.
35:28Thank you very much.
35:30There are a number of possible explanations for this result.
35:33One, of course, is that the MEN2B theory is wrong.
35:37Two is that this is not Lincoln's blood.
35:41It could be a contaminant.
35:43And finally, the artifact may not be genuine Lincoln.
35:48That is, it could have been concocted, for whatever reason, back in the 1800s,
35:53with somebody else's blood.
35:56The investigation is back to square one.
35:59But then, a new lead emerges.
36:03Dr. Mark Haverkos is a collector of Lincoln assassination relics.
36:08To Haverkos, provenance is the holy grail.
36:14Abraham Lincoln, like any other popular individual, has been counterfeited, bootlegged,
36:19and, you know, who knows what, how many hundreds of times.
36:22I'm the type of guy that always wants to go for the real thing.
36:27If I'm studying the assassination, I want the real deal.
36:38Hey, Mark.
36:39Mark Haverkos.
36:40Good to meet you.
36:41I think we got the stuff you're looking for.
36:42All right.
36:43So the first thing we're looking at here, John, is the piece of head bandage.
36:51There are three or four dark dots on it.
36:56The spots could contain blood.
36:59There's also a piece of the top coat Lincoln was wearing when he was killed.
37:04And what I'm looking for is to see if there's any scabby crusts that might be on the surface,
37:10because that would be ideal.
37:13Here we have the crux of the whole thing.
37:15Ah.
37:16The matter.
37:17The matter.
37:18The best sample may not be fabric, but a tiny clump of hair.
37:22Oh, yeah.
37:23That's what I put under the microscope in my clinic, and it looked to me to be a stuff of
37:30a cellular nature.
37:31All right.
37:32If it's brain, it's great, because there's lots of DNA in brain.
37:37Wow.
37:38And this here is the most stained piece that I have.
37:43This is Latimer's plate.
37:44Okay.
37:45Wow.
37:46That is a deep stain.
37:47When I look at this and I think that that is an actual piece of cloth that was in contact
37:55laying underneath the head of the dying president, it just gives me chills.
38:01And once again...
38:02This collection is a huge find for Soto's, but the artifacts do present a complication.
38:07It's reasonable to assume that the blood on Keene's dress must have come from Lincoln's
38:15head resting on her lap.
38:17But these relics could actually be stained with the blood of another.
38:24Army Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancee, Clara Harris, were the Lincoln's unfortunate
38:30guests at Ford's Theater.
38:32He was very lucky.
38:33It almost severed an artery.
38:34Mr. Lincoln!
38:35For Henry and Clara, who later married, the trauma of the assassination tragically altered
38:47the course of their lives.
38:49He felt guilty that he hadn't reacted earlier and he might have prevented the assassination.
39:10Henry gradually descended into madness.
39:20Eighteen years later, he reenacted the crime, killing his wife and wounding himself.
39:31Proving Soto's theory hinges on isolating Lincoln's DNA.
39:36Rathbone's blood would derail the investigation.
39:42These samples could confirm Soto's hypothesis, but Haverkos will have to sacrifice part of his
39:48collection for the sake of history.
39:50I thought, you know, we have one life to live.
39:53We're not here that long.
39:54And so, let's have at it.
39:57All right.
39:59Let's step inside.
40:02We'll start with this.
40:05Mm-hmm.
40:06There you go.
40:07This looks, uh, that looks like sort of fibrin blood-body strands.
40:12Mm-hmm.
40:13The scope reveals what Soto's has been hoping to see.
40:18Biological matter.
40:20This is a sample of head bandage that was used at the deathbed at the assassination.
40:27Well, that could be some blood then.
40:30So, is that our red spot, this rectangle?
40:33Right smack in the middle of your field.
40:35Yeah.
40:36That must be it.
40:38These test tubes contain Soto's best hope.
40:42Okay.
40:43We could be as close as a couple days of work from having the answer if everything goes right.
40:54It's been 10 months since John Soto's first attempt to isolate Lincoln's DNA.
41:00Now, he is staking his hopes on the samples from Mark Haverkos' collection.
41:06I don't have gut feelings.
41:09Uh, I just try to handle the facts one at a time.
41:13I'm not gonna try and coach the universe to make one of the scenarios come to fruition.
41:19The universe may have a new curveball in store.
41:23Hey, John, you wanna see some results?
41:25Oh, absolutely.
41:26DNA amplification results from the Haverkos' samples.
41:30Right there.
41:31Right away.
41:32This is the first 40.
41:33Okay.
41:34Primary reaction.
41:35You see nothing.
41:36Not even a whisper of the band on anything.
41:40No.
41:41Nothing.
41:42No smear, no anything on those three primer sets.
41:44And then the secondary.
41:46Uh-oh.
41:47We've got a couple bands.
41:49Good.
41:50This one right here is exactly the right size.
41:53Which sample is that?
41:55Let's see.
41:56One, two, three, four.
41:57It's the fifth one we picked.
41:59It's the swab of the cover plate over the bandage.
42:03Huh.
42:04That's not the one I would have picked.
42:07The appearance of the band also reveals a clue to the age of the DNA.
42:12That second one is the biggest fragment, which suggests that whatever DNA there is pretty degraded.
42:20Right.
42:21So that would even tend to suggest that this is old DNA.
42:24Right.
42:25Yeah.
42:26It's good that we have some bands to look at.
42:28We don't want to get overly excited yet.
42:31I don't think we're overly excited.
42:33They have DNA.
42:35But now the team will have to answer the $64,000 question.
42:39Does it show a mutation for MEN2B?
42:48Hi, John.
42:49How are you?
42:50Hi, John.
42:51I have Dr. Eng and Muhammad here to share some results if you're ready.
42:55Hi, John.
42:56Hey, John.
42:57Good morning or afternoon, where you may be.
43:00You saw the bands that we were sequencing.
43:05These six of those gave us good sequences.
43:10And unfortunately, none of those sequences had the 918 mutation that we were looking for.
43:19Well, that's too bad.
43:20More testing is needed.
43:22They may still track down the MEN2B mutation on an obscure part of this gene.
43:28But any answers could be months or even years away.
43:32That's the name of the game.
43:33That's research.
43:34We keep on tracking.
43:35As is true of all worthwhile things in life, this has proved to be harder than I originally
43:42thought.
43:43The Laura Keene sample turned out to be a dead end.
43:46The Haverkos bandage provided a tantalizing glimmer of hope, but so far only a negative result.
43:54Perhaps it's inauthentic or even Rathbone's blood.
43:58Sotos hasn't proved his theory, but it hasn't been disproved either.
44:05Over time, the team may be able to tease a result from the remaining Haverkos samples.
44:11And there is always the promise of finding other artifacts with even better provenance and better DNA.
44:20You just have to persevere and work through the problems as they arise.
44:27Sotos is always searching.
44:31I can be tenacious about some things.
44:39Hello.
44:40Good.
44:41Can I get a hot chocolate, please?
44:44How much is that?
44:45It may be the most recognizable face in American history, but a whole new chapter in Lincoln's
44:51story still waits to be written.
44:55Without historical and prehistorical research, you can say whatever you like about the past.
45:00So by interrogating the past and reconstructing it as accurately as we possibly can, we can nail
45:07down what really happened.
45:09I love putting science and history together.
45:14I think this is a groundbreaking piece of work.
45:17I'm honored to be here.
45:19Well, sure, I'd be disappointed if I found out that I was wrong.
45:25There's nothing like failing in front of the entire world to just make your day better.
45:30But whether he has it or not, those dice were rolled 200 years ago.
45:36So nothing I can do can change that.
45:38All I can do is do the best job that I can to try and find out how the dice landed.
45:46At the end of the day, there is this mysterious, remote, in some ways unknowable figure who we go on trying to know.
45:57If somebody says, why bother with this, why does this matter?
46:02Then I think that person would also have to ask, why does history matter?
46:06Why does history matter?
46:14What are the decisions that you have to do?
46:16I know you put everything with everything that is worth making?
46:20I know I definitely have to ask you a question.
46:22Even if I've asked, why is this matter?
46:23That's why you do not believe it?
46:25If you don't believe it, I will have to ask.
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