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Zink and Pusch are now negotiating the complex political path towards using next-generation techniques on Tutankhamun and his kin. "We would love to do this," says Zink. "It would absolutely make sense. The problem is to do it in Egypt." With no samples allowed out of the country, they would have to take the sequencing machines to Cairo, an expensive proposition. And there is concern, says Zink, that such work might yield politically sensitive information about the genetic origin of the pharaohs, and whether any of their descendants are alive today. "This goes right to their history."