As floodwater slowly drained from Louisiana last fall, state authorities began the macabre task of identifying the hundreds of dead bodies it left behind. Many of the corpses were far from their homes and highly decomposed. Officials knew they could only identify them with DNA, although even that approach would be hampered by the scope of the destruction. So Louisiana drew on people with expertise from another mass disaster: the destruction of the World Trade Center.
"Most of us hoped it was a once-in-a-lifetime event," says Joan Bailey-Wilson, a geneticist who worked on identification at the WTC. "But sadly it was not."
After 9/11, the National Institute of Justice convened an expert panel of geneticists to help city and state officials identify the dead. Many of those panel members, such as Bailey-Wilson, returned for another tour of duty with a group organized after Katrina, and their experience gave a head ...
