A Washtenaw County software development firm is helping families of the dead and missing in Israel find closure. The Ann Arbor company has provided an advanced tool to identify casualties in the Israel-Hamas war. WEMU's Cathy Shafran recently visited the Middle East lab where the DNA forensics work is being done.
(Caution: This report contains graphic descriptions)
Howard Cash’s Washtenaw County company, Gene Codes Corporation, had already been a leader in DNA sequencing software for more than a decade when a pair of planes hit New York’s Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. As Cash watched TV images of the buildings collapse into rubble from his Pittsfield Township offices, he knew his customers in government agencies and police agencies were simply not equipped to deal with the magnitude of DNA matching for the thousands of bodies lost in the rubble. So, he reached out.
(HOWARD CASH) “I went to Zingerman’s bakehouse, that’s pretty close to where our office is, and I got 200 Zingerman’s brownies. I sent them to customers at the FBI and AFDIL and NY city and the CDC. And I said if there’s anything we can do, you only have to ask."
That outreach triggered a meeting with officials at the office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Washington D.C. Cash's firm was asked to help. His team worked tirelessly to create an algorithm and computer program he since has since termed "M-FISys," an acronym for "Mass-Fatality Identification System." The algorithm matches patterns of DNA, even without complete markers and match those samples with DNA of more distant relatives than just parents. In the case of 9/11, the algorithm helped sort DNA samples from some 16 tractor-trailers full of body parts taken from the rubble and compare those with 100,000 reference samples.
(HOWARD CASH) “It could be DNA from somebody’s toothbrush or baseball hat and family members. And put that all together, so it could be matched and compared all at once. And that had not been done before.”
Since its use following the 9/11 terror attack, M-FISys has been used in disaster recoveries in more than 60 countries around the world, and, most recently, it was put into use as a tool in the Israel/Hamas war.
(DR. NURIT BUBLIL) "We have thousands of samples now."
That’s Nurit Bublil. She is head of Israel's National Center for Forensic Medicine. Her office has been overwhelmed with thousands of bone fragments- what they call postmortem samples that have been arriving at the center in white tagged bags ever since October 7th.
“This is the pelvis, which we’ll be able to see.”
The bags arrive first at the center in office of the country’s chief forensic anthropologist, a floor below Bublil’s office.
On this particular day, some 75 days into the war, a trio of forensic anthropologists empty the contents of one of the bags on a lab table and begin lining up the human remains. The forensic anthropologists in the lab start organizing the contents of this bag. They line up six rib bones that appear to be the framework for the left rib cage. Below the ribs, they place a portion of a pelvis.
“It will probably smell."
She notes this is expected when there is flesh still hanging from a body part.
As they examine the pelvis, their analysis begins.
(NURIT) “We looked at the auricular surface and determined the person is quite young.”
(CATHY) "And do we know if it’s male or female?"
(NURIT) "It’s male."
On a small table to their left, there is another set of bones they have been sorting through for weeks.
“That is a femur."
What distinguishes these bone fragments is their white, ashen color.
“Because of the white coloration, we can tell they were burnt at 700 degrees Celsius."
Michal Peer is Chief Forensic Anthropologist in Israel.
(MICHAL PEER) "And because of the fragmentation, we can tell it was burned for a very long period of time.”
While the team works tirelessly to identify a sense of who these victims were, and how they may have died, a sample of each of the remains is then taken one floor up to the forensic lab.
“These are bone body samples.”
Forensic DNA experts then carefully place the same body samples in a centrifuge to separate particles for DNA testing. From there, Bublil says each of the thousands of DNA samples are categorized.
(NURIT) “There are a lot of cases where we had one body sac that was open and tested, and a couple weeks later, we found in another sac the same profile, meaning it was part of the same person who was exploded. We use M-FISys all the time for that. We just need to press the button, and we have all the matching.”
Since the start of the war, she says Cash’s software has helped the Tel Aviv lab successfully return multiple postmortem remains to more than 150 families.
(NURIT) “Our wish is to bury the person with as much of the same body parts of this person owns. So, it is a lot of work. So, we are highly dependent on M-FISys to basically direct us how to reconstruct the samples to one person and bring it to bury it.”
As for the Palestinians in Gaza, Cash says, as of right now, they lack the infrastructure required to use his company’s system. He says the task of identifying remains of Palestinian families could eventually be taken on by the Egyptian government.
(HOWARD) “We’ve talked to a bunch of people in Egypt. There’s nothing progressing so far, but we just made sure they know we’re available if they get that assignment, and we’ll help them if they want.”
While the M-FISys system may not help resolve international conflicts or be able to undo mass fatality disasters, Cash is convinced the algorithm’s ability to bring closure to loved ones may be one of the truly helpful tools in disasters worldwide.
(HOWARD) “We’re in a situation where I find myself saying there are people who have lost someone they loved, and there is nothing whatsoever they can do to help. And we have something that can help.”
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