The New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner is the largest medical examiner’s office in the United States. According to its website, the office currently has about 600 employees.
Its experts investigate approximately 8,500 deaths per year in New York City and test tens of thousands of items of evidence in their laboratories.
Not many people know that 23 years after the 9/11 attacks, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of New York City is still identifying and analyzing the remains from the World Trade Center site using the most advanced technology and science.
On the 23rd anniversary of the attacks on September 11, 2001, Scientific American‘s Science Quickly, Rachel Feltman, hosted Kathleen Corrado, the forensics executive director at Syracuse University College of Arts & Sciences.
The topic was how technologies that allow us to generate a DNA profile from a tiny sample have made leaps and bounds.
Since 9/11, advancements in technology and techniques developed over the past two decades are making the work of forensic scientists a little easier to identify victims.
Before 9/11, forensic scientists couldn’t get data from very small fragments of DNA.
According to the Science Quickly podcast, the event that happened on 9/11 in the World Trade Center was the first time that DNA analysis was used to identify victims on such a large scale.
Corrado said that for the first time, forensic scientists had to know how to process, store, and track many samples.
They also had to think about software for inventorying the samples and analyzing the DNA. They had to automate.
Because of the large volume of samples, they had automatic robotics to process the samples.
Corrado added that one of the biggest game changers is the rapid DNA instrument, which does all of those processes within the instrument and does it in about 90 minutes.
Other benefits are that these instruments can be placed directly at the disaster site, and the samples can be processed there.
These instruments were used in the 2018 Camp Fire in California and the Maui wildfires. Also, it’s used in things like the war in Ukraine.
These instruments have a lot of other uses besides mass disaster victim identification.
Also new is next-generation sequencing, where they are sequencing smaller fragments and then putting them together into one larger fragment to read the sample and generate information.
As this technology progresses, the labs are picking up this technology, validating it, and using it to identify more of those remains. Click here for more on Science Quickly.
Employment of forensic science technicians is projected to grow 14 percent from 2023 to 2033, much faster than the average for all occupations, Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) says.
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