23 years ago, a series of coordinated terrorist attacks killed nearly 3,000 people and turned

Manhattan's iconic World Trade Center into Ground Zero.

Most of you probably remember seeing footage and photos of the long complicated

process of looking for victims in the smoldering debris.

But you might not realize that for forensic scientists that work

is far from finished even today. For Scientific American science quickly, I'm

Rachel Feltman. I'm joined today by Kathleen Corrado, the Forensics Executive Director at

Syracuse University College of Arts and Sciences. She's here to tell us how the

staggering scale of 9-11's Mass Casualty event presented forensic scientists with new challenges and how the

lessons they learned are helping them identify wildfire victims, suspected criminals, and the

many remaining casualties of 9-11 itself.

Thank you so much for joining us today.

My pleasure.

So, broadly speaking, what kind of impact did 9-11 have on the forensic science community?

Well, the event that happened in 9-11 in the World Trade Center was basically the first time that DNA analysis was used to identify victims on such a large scale.

So while there were about 2,700 victims or so, due to the fire, the explosion, the building collapse, there were a lot of very

small samples.

A lot of the bodies were degraded.

Really, that's the first time that we really had to think about how do we deal with this many samples, this many people.

We had to look at how we store the samples, how we track the samples.

We had to think about software in terms of inventorying the samples, in terms

of analyzing the DNA, we had to automate, and then again, with the samples being so degraded,

...