NEW YORK — Identity--the first thing each infant learns--is the first thing death erases, leaving the body a riddle that only a name can resolve.
With a name, a family can bury a loved one. With a name, an estate can be settled; a headstone can be etched; an end can be made.
Restoring the proper name to each scrap of bone and flesh found in the rubble of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center here is expected to require what experts in the field say will be the largest forensic identification effort ever conducted in this country. So crushing was the collapse of the twin 110-story towers, so caustic the chemicals unleashed, and so fierce the fires, that few intact bodies are being found.
Since the attacks, scores of medical examiners, dental experts, molecular biologists and pathologists at laboratories in New York, Utah and Maryland have been struggling to identify the remains.
In the end, a million fragments of human body parts--many burned or torn beyond recognition--may be found in the wreckage, several forensic experts said. Each fragment will be bagged, tagged with a bar code, entered into a computer database, and its every characteristic--down to its DNA--studied intently in the months to come.
There are other teams studying the remains of those who died at the Pentagon in Virginia and in the crash of United Airlines Flight 93 near Shanksville, Pa. But the problems facing forensic experts in New York are especially daunting.
The Pentagon has military identification tags and DNA banks to assist in identifying victims. Airlines have passenger manifests. Workers at the trade center began with only an uncertain list of thousands of missing people, including residents of 60 nations, that fluctuates faster than they can recover remains.
Of the 276 confirmed dead so far, 206 had been identified.
Identifying the rest "is an enormous task," said forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow, who pioneered many of the identification techniques now being put to the task.
"The challenges to the recovery people and the forensic scientists are going to be immeasurably greater than we have ever faced before in any disasters in this country," Snow said.
No one knows how long it will take, how much it will cost, or the emotional toll it will exact from the forensic experts now working in three shifts, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
