Credit: PAINTING / ALAMY

King Richard III will be the first royal to be sequenced in a project spearheaded by the Wellcome Trust and the Leverhulme Trust. The 500-year old bones were found without a coffin under a parking lot in Leicester during an archaeological dig in September 2012. The DNA sequencing effort, directed by Turi King, the geneticist who identified the Plantagenet king, will take at least a year and cost over $160,000. The results might reveal whether the scoliosis that contorted his back was genetic, and his susceptibility to disease. But whether the monarch sent his young nephews, the little princes in the Tower, to their deaths will remain unresolved.