Inventory of the Lost

An inventory of the lost

Suppose your father was working high in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. You have been told by authorities in New York City what intuition told you as you watched the two towers collapse: Your father is dead.

Yet that conclusion is a municipal bureaucracy's intuition, no more certifiable than your own. Your father's remains have not been found. He is presumed to have been killed largely because, first, he could not possibly have survived and, second, he has not been seen since.

So your grief is compounded by a question as illogical as it is impossible for you to shake: What if, somehow, he escaped? What if, in some perhaps tragicomic way that screenwriters might never imagine, he managed to get out alive?

This sort of bizarre ending doesn't often happen in real life, of course. Extremely rare is the victim of war, or of violence, or of some other tragedy, whose remains are never found and identified. If survivors of those victims get the terrible pain of loss, they invariably get proof that the victim is, irrefutably, deceased.

Not so, though, for many survivors of the 2,792 people killed at the World Trade Center. Working with body parts retrieved from mountains of rubble, the office of New York City's medical examiner has confirmed the identities of 1,518 of those World Trade Center victims. But scientific tests have failed to link any of the body parts to the more than 1,200 other victims.

The majority of those body parts exhumed from the debris - 12,000 of almost 20,000 fragments - are a tragic inventory of the lost. Efforts to match them to known DNA samples provided by the families of victims - strands of hair lifted from combs left at home, for example - have failed, often because the retrieved body fragments were so badly incinerated, crushed or deteriorated that their DNA was unknowable.

Unknowable, that is, using today's DNA technologies. Faith in future technologies has led to a remarkably smart way of dealing with all those still unidentified body parts. They are being dried, individually vacuum sealed and packaged for a time when new means of identifying human tissue may tie them to specific victims.

Under a protocol developed by city officials working with representatives