More than two decades after the September 11 attacks, three more victims have been given their names, thanks to advances in DNA technology. The breakthrough is the result of work carried out by a team at New York's medical examiner's office, which has never stopped trying to identify those killed when the towers came down. For the families involved, it means a long awaited answer after 24 years of uncertainty.
At the center of that effort is Mark Desire, who was there from the very beginning. On the morning of the attacks, he rushed to ground zero with a team from the medical examiner's office, charged with preserving evidence. He has recalled gathering the team's equipment when the South Tower cracked above them, leaving them directly beneath the plume of debris. In that instant, he has said, his only thought was that this was how he was going to die.
Twenty four years later, Desire is an assistant director of the same office, now overseeing the team that continues the painstaking work of identification. What began as an emergency response in the dust of Lower Manhattan has become a long term mission, one that has outlasted the initial shock of the attacks and settled into years of methodical laboratory work.
The conditions at ground zero made that task extraordinarily difficult. As Desire explained, everything that destroys DNA was present at the site. There was the fire itself, and then the water used to put it out, along with sunlight, mold and bacteria. On top of that were the jet fuel, the diesel fuel and the many chemicals that had been contained inside the buildings, all of which worked against the survival of any genetic material.
It is improved technology that has made the latest identifications possible. All of the recovered remains have already been tested at least once, and many of them have been tested multiple times over the years. When the team returns to a sample now, it is retested using newer and more advanced methods. Those methods require less material, which means that even smaller fragments can yield more usable data than was possible before.
For the people doing the work, the true measure of success lies well beyond the laboratory. Desire has described the emotion of being able to hold a fragment of a person in his hand and, after 24 years, finally return that loved one to their family. He spoke of relatives crying, hugging and shaking, and of being thanked for bringing their family member home, a moment he called deeply powerful.
The job, however, is far from finished. There are still around 1,100 victims of the September 11 attacks who have not been identified. The team behind this latest progress says it has no intention of stopping, and that it will keep working to put a name to as many of the missing as it possibly can.