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Shaler, director of the Department of Forensic Biology for New York City. “M-FISys allows us to do quality checks on the software, on the samples, on the analysis,” says Robert C.

It can present a snapshot of not just every test done on a sample but of the progression of those tests, as well as the forensic scientists’ comments. It can link to other databases, such as those containing descriptions of, say, family relationships or what the victim wore to work the day of the disaster, or the medical examiner’s postmortem findings. The program constructs “virtual” DNA profiles where actual ones have literally gone up in smoke and permits users to add or subtract sample analyses from the composites as the evidence changes. M-FISys brings together three types of DNA analysis-some standard, some not generally used for identification purposes-for repeated “all-against-all” comparisons among victim and kinship samples. As of June 2003, the medical examiner’s office had collected 7,681 personal items, including toothbrushes, razors, and hairbrushes, and 11,641 cheek swabs from some 7,166 relatives.Īs of late July, 1,518 victims had been identified-with 779 of them, or just over half, identified by DNA alone.

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Information-everything from DNA analysis of victims’ remains and their personal effects, as well as of relatives’ cheek swabs, to dental records and fingerprints-was being stored in 22 different databases as varied as FileMaker Pro and Oracle. But by mid-December, CoDIS, which was designed to compare a single sample to a large database of DNA profiles, had identified just 203 remains representing 105 people. Suddenly, there were these loved ones’ remains waiting to be sent home.”īefore M-FISys, the New York medical examiner’s office was attempting to make DNA identifications using an FBI program called CoDIS (or Combined DNA Index System), which is generally used to identify felons based on the DNA found at crime scenes, along with Charles Brenner’s longstanding DNA-VIEW and Benoit Leclair’s Mass Disaster Kinship Analysis Program. Says Cash, “There was such a mountain of information, there wasn’t a way to sift through it and find the matches until that first day. (The subsidiary would protect the parent company against potential lawsuits should any victim not be identified.) The day the medical examiner’s office first turned on the software, December 13, 2001, 55 new matches that ultimately resulted in identifications were made. He started a wholly owned subsidiary called Gene Codes Forensics to develop a new breed of identification software: M-FISys (pronounced “emphasis”), an acronym for Mass-Fatality Identification System. Using $2 million in profits to hire 11 new people and double his office space, Cash sprang into action.

Ultimately, 19,937 separate remains were found, with some victims recovered in as many as 200 pieces.

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Could Cash-the founder of Gene Codes, a bioinformatics company recognized for a DNA-sequencing program called Sequencher-build the software necessary to manage and identify the remains of the 2,792 missing victims of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center? Existing identification tools were inadequate for the task: The scope of the project was mind-bogglingly large, and the remains to be identified had been pulverized and commingled by the falling towers and burning jet fuel. On the other end of the line was the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York. On September 26, 2001, Howard Cash got a phone call that changed his life.

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