"We never stop inquiring into victims'

It can smell something strange around the office of forensic pathologist Barbara Sampson in one of the world's leading institutes for DNA research, warns an employee. The autopsy rooms are nearby, and the work goes in a city like New York always.

Every year autopsy required by 5000 bodies and studied here 50,000 documents, for example murder and rape cases. Meanwhile, there is a fifteen year old task: identification of the victims of 9/11.

40 percent of the 2753 people who perished in the World Trade Center was never found a trace. Almost daily to try members of a ten-person team led by Chief Medical Examiner Sampson extracting DNA of skeletal remains found in the rubble of Ground Zero. ,, Frustrating work, '' said Sampson. ,, It is slow and difficult. ''

Tarnished
All 22,000 human remains that have been recovered have been implemented over the last fifteen years, DNA testing, but 7585 remains have still not been provided with a name. They are so much damaged by fire, aviation fuel and firewater that the DNA is virtually unrecognizable. So is it that still 1113 people are looking for.

Sampson has made it her personal mission to find proof of their death. By stiff to keep testing: after ten failures provides an eleventh test on the same piece of bone sometimes indeed a DNA profile. And by stretching the boundaries of science. If it does not work with existing technology, to develop the New York researchers themselves a better method.

By editorial AD Photo: Chantal Heijnen