1. The DNA and three labs with identical results:
My "database" of what I'm writing here is a long talk I had with my husband , who is a research scientist about publications of results. He claims after having published virtually hundreds of conference papers but so far only 5 journal papers, that a publication in a journal that is peer revised is a high goal and a big success if you're into research. He has himself worked as a reviewer in his field of research, so knows the criteria of acceptance: to be accepted with a paper at a journal you need: real good news about research or a topic that mightily interests readers because of something uncommon in it. Plus you need to have something decisive in your work: "maybe" does not qualify as content of a journal paper.
I don't know what field of research your husband works in, but my husband is a researcher in solar physics with quite a few more than five journal papers to his credit (as was my father), and I worked as an editor in the journals department of a major life sciences association for over 20 years and read probably thousands of research papers in the process of editing them (to say nothing of having done research for my PhD and published a paper in a peer-reviewed journal), and from both our experiences I'd say that "maybe" does qualify as content. In fact it can be an important result. Now, for a journal like Nature, where they're looking for high-profile results, they can be more selective and not accept papers which don't give really interesting answers, but they still aren't in the business - as far as I know, anyway - of encouraging people to submit papers whose conclusions are sensational at the expense of being correct. It reflects very badly on a journal to publish fraudulent results on a regular basis. I know it's happened a few times that Nature has published high-profile work that's had to be retracted after either genuine mistakes or falsification has been shown to have occurred, but it's a
very small proportion of the work published in that journal over the course of a year. To extrapolate from those few cases to saying that anything published in Nature is suspect is, IMO, inappropriate.
So there we have an interesting topic to begin with: is Anna Anderson Anastasia? We have scientific research to publish about but to get a journal publication you need: results. So it was clear IMHO to the scientists that if they wanted to have a journal paper, they needed results.
In this case, "inconclusive" wouldn't have cut it as far as Nature was concerned. However, either "yes" or "no" would have been equally interesting. Nature published a paper by more or less the same people claiming that they
had found the burial place of the imperial family, a result far more likely to be challenged than one saying they hadn't.
My husband said that in such a case even if more than one research institute is involved, the different groups of scientists will work together normally to peer assess their work and to eleminate faults. They probably won't work against each other or keep their results secret.
They don't have to work against each other in this case since one of the labs was testing a different sample from the other two. If the hair sample had come from a different person and had given different results in the analysis, then they're committing criminal fraud by saying in writing that it gave the same results. Do you really think that's likely? If so, do you have a basis for that conclusion? If something like this can be shown, it would be a career-ending event for whichever scientists had falsified their result.
My husband said that of course it's a bit different when it comes to proof for a court of law (even though not always) but if it was a privately financed investigation than scientists would work together to give their client the best result possible - and themselves the opportunity to be recognized in their own field of research with a paper that from its topic attracts attention.
And if that involved falsifying results, that would be the end of their careers if it was ever found out - which it very probably would be, given the high profile of the case. I mean, either these nucleotides were the same or they weren't; there isn't a lot of room for interpretation.
I'm still not clear why you think - which you fairly obviously do - that this sort of highly unethical and downright criminal behaviour would be more likely than the notion that their results were in fact what they said they were. I mean - I'm sorry, but this has some strong overtones of the creationist "evolutionists are all in a conspiracy to falsify their results because they hate God" apologetics, which is based squarely on emotional needs and not on objective evidence.
2. But they added another tidbit of information: Anna Anderson and Carl Maucher could well be related.
My husband again: he says he has no idea how human DNA developpes but as any human being has a different one and we seem not to head for one "DNA-mixture" in the far future that anyone shares, he believes that there could well be a sort of "regional" element to it. Meaning that the probability to find similar structures between two people is greater in a village where they intermarried for generations than on taking people from North African, comparing them with Scandinavians. And he said that 1:300 does not sound reliable, as there is always a basic fault in results, if you're able to find a match 1: 300, that doesn't make for scientific proof in his opinion.
Which is why the scientists said that it was very likely that she was related to Carl Maucher, not that she definitely was. They said in their paper, and Dr Stoneking said to me, that the notion that she wasn't related to Prince Philip is virtually certain; the notion that she was related to Carl Maucher is highly likely but a lot less certain.
Especially as no regional component has been thought of. The Schanzkowskis and the Romanovs were roughly from the same area - Russia and Baltic Sea-countries including Germany.
Doesn't sound to me, from reading the paper, that the regional component had been ignored. They knew at the time that the DNA type wasn't common; perhaps things have changed in the meantime and the odds of her being related to Carl Maucher have changed. However, nothing about that is going to change the fact that her DNA didn't match Prince Philip's.
While scientific results published in papers have been challenged before and found to be lacking on closer scrutiny. Sometimes because of errors, in other cases because the wish for scientific fame was more important to the scientists than scientifical honesty. Let's just name "Dolly" as an example or "Hwang Woo-Suk" when it comes to genetics.
And how many thousands of honest researchers are there to set against a handful of dishonest ones? This, again, sounds like the creationist argument that, look at the Piltdown Man hoax, so clearly everything ever done by any scientist in evolutionary biology is wrong because scientists obviously have an agenda that's more important than their science. It's inductive reasoning run wild, to say nothing of attempting to smear someone's professional reputation by association. It also seems to have a strong element of projection; creationists aren't interested in scientific data - they Know The Truth, and therefore they believe that scientists aren't interested in scientific data either but are just out to prove that The Truth is wrong. If you don't have actual reason to believe that Drs Gill and Stoneking are falsifying their data, what does Hwang Woo-Suk have to do with it? Yes, there are some dishonest people in the sciences just like everywhere else. The scientific method, however, has some built-in checks and balances to identify incorrect work, so mistakes and falsifications are usually caught. So far the results in the Anna Anderson tests don't seem to have been successfully challenged, at least on a scientific basis. Most of the challenges have been pretty much what you're doing - trying to discredit the scientists by questioning their motivation or their honesty, without, as far as I can tell, much basis other than wishful thinking.
So my personal decision is that I won't put too much weight on the DNA-results. I have no insider knowledge, so can only try to evaluate from the outside. There are too many questions open for discussion for me: starting at the source of the samples, what happened to Kurth's third sample, the fact hat the results are very convenient for the labs involved..
Well, from my perspective of having been around scientists for my whole life is that I'd prefer not to throw accusations of misconduct and fraud around without some actual evidence. In my experience, people who don't like a scientific result are very fast to point the finger at the scientists concerned whereas they're quite happy to accept the honesty and competence of scientists who come up with results that they do like. My husband has been on the receiving end of some of this stuff because he works in the area of solar physics and climate change, so we both know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of casual accusations of fraud and misconduct just because someone doesn't like your results, and I don't care for it under any circumstances. I think the least a person can do is to steer clear of accusations - or even sly innuendo - of misconduct, fraud, incompetence, or anything along those lines without some actual evidence thereof. In this case, considering how badly some people need to believe that Anna Anderson was Anastasia, I'm sure there have been attempts to discredit the work. That they haven't succeeded should tell you something.