Forensic scientists are still working to identify victims of the 9/11 attacks using advancements in technology and techniques developed over the past two decades.
Twenty-three years ago, a series of coordinated terrorist attacks killed nearly 3,000 people and turned Manhattan’s iconic World Trade Center into Ground Zero. Most of you probably remember seeing footage and photos of the long, complicated process of looking for victims in the smoldering debris. But you might not realize that for forensic scientists, that work is far from finished even today.I’m Rachel Feltman.
And then a second type of comparison that we would do is where we compare the victim’s DNA to relatives. And so that would be first-degree relatives—we’re looking for parents, children, sometimes siblings.
And then the third reason why they’re very helpful is that we don’t need a DNA analyst—we don’t need an expert to run these samples. So as before, every sample had to be run by a DNA expert in the lab and interpreted by a DNA expert, these results are spit out in 90 minutes, and you don’t need to be a DNA expert to run it to get the results.
Additionally, with the reference samples, something that’s really important now is the informed consent. So we wanna make sure that the relatives that are giving their samples know what it is that they’re giving, know why they’re giving it and also they know what’s gonna happen to that sample and to that data afterwards—you know, is it gonna go into a database, or is it gonna be destroyed? So there’s informed consent now, which is really important in terms of protecting people’s privacy.
First there was this flood, so all of the bodies were submerged underwater, and then they were scattered in such a large area, and it was really hot there; the sun’s beating down on these bodies. And so all of that causes the remains to degrade, and unfortunately there were so many victims in that mass disaster that they couldn’t collect everything quickly enough. And so in that instance the temperature and the heat really affected the ability to use DNA.
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