August 22, 2003

An Emphasis on Compassion

Continued from page 4

By Thea Singer

Nearly every week since the program's launch, in December 2001, Cash has flown from his company's headquarters in Ann Arbor, MI, to Manhattan to deliver the latest release of the program in order to accommodate the ever-changing requirements of the medical examiner's office. To date, there have been 68 iterations. Among the improvements has been a quality-control test to ensure that remains that anthropologists have guaranteed belong to just one person indeed belong to just one person. (In one case, the bone from one victim was so deeply imbedded in the tissue of another that what had on visual inspection looked like a single sample turned out, upon DNA analysis, to be two.) Another made it possible to pinpoint the location at which individual remains were found on a roughly 25-by-25-meter virtual grid of the disaster site, in order to cross-reference unidentified remains with identified ones that had been found in the same general area.

Cash's contract with the city of New York officially ends on September 11, 2004-or sooner if his job is done. But the end of the project likely won't mean returning to business as usual. Sequencher, the company's original moneymaker, needs to be upgraded. The program, which has some 16,000 users, got pushed to the back burner when Cash received that fateful call. And there are new applications for M-FISys to consider. The software could be used in missing-persons work in a state forensics lab or for the International Commission on Missing Persons. Components of it, of course, could be applied to more common needs. For example, the kinship-analysis piece could be used in products for genetic counseling and for paternity searches, and even to protect endangered species by indicating restrictions for crossbreeding-or for identifying particularly dangerous pathogens.

Cash is also investigating the possibility of building a portable mass-fatality identification system to be used for other disasters-for example, a hurricane in the Philippines, an earthquake in Turkey, or another terrorist attack-so that, as he puts it "someone else doesn't have to start from scratch." To date, 12 countries have expressed interest in such a system. They likely share the viewpoint of England's Maguire. "If I were to be involved in trying to run an incident on the scale of September 11 without a piece of software like this," he says, "it would be in my view almost impossible to do."