Sorenson's DNA aid is 'miracle'

They met under circumstances beyond difficult. She was knee deep, quite literally, in unidentified dead bodies. He was fresh off a plane after traveling halfway around the world.

There was no time for formalities, so Dave Rockwood, a goatee-wearing American businessman from Park City, Utah, got right to the point. In fluent Thai, he told Dr. KhunYing Porntip Rojanasunan, deputy director of Thailand's Central Institute of Forensic Science, he was there to help her identify the bodies of the thousands who perished in the Indian Ocean tsunami.

Her first reaction: Who is this man and how can he possibly help?

Followed several minutes later by her second reaction, which she recounted Thursday during a visit to the University of Utah, "This man is a miracle."

---

I met Dave Rockwood and the famous Dr. Porntip Thursday on the Utah campus, where they were hosted by Dr. Don Pedersen, another Utahn who rushed to Thailand this past January to assist in tsunami aid.

Porntip — as she is known far and wide in Thailand, where she is something of a one-woman real-life CSI movie — is in Utah as part of a Thai delegation hosted by Utah billionaire James Sorenson's DNA testing company, Sorenson Genomics.

With mutual affection and emotion, Rockwood and Porntip explained the details of their serendipitous meeting on Jan. 7 at a makeshift morgue at a Thai temple near Phuket, 12 days after the tsunami struck.

Dave had been at home in Park City on Dec. 26, 2004, when he turned on TV and saw images of the tsunami's destruction.

The news hit him hard and personal. Thirty years ago, he served an LDS mission in Thailand, and in the intervening years he has owned and operated Pacific Rim Consulting, an Asian-American business with offices in Park City and Bangkok.

"These were my people," said Dave, "I had to do something."

That something turned out to be brokering a partnership between Sorenson Genomics — one of the world's most advanced DNA identification companies — and the Thai identification effort.

With Sorenson's authorization, Rockwood flew to Thailand to offer identification kits free of charge.

Fortuitously, the day he met Porntip and made his offer was the day bureaucratic red tape threatened to shut down the identification process.