A software company from Ann Arbor, Michigan, spent three-and-a-half years building the technology that helped identify victims of the September 11 attacks — and a quarter-century later, that same DNA-matching system is still finding names for the missing. In August 2026, the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner announced it had used a new genetic technology to identify a previously unknown 9/11 victim, the 1,654th person confirmed dead among the 2,753 killed.
The story of how an Ann Arbor company ended up at the center of the nation’s largest forensic identification effort begins with Howard Cash, president and CEO of Gene Codes Corporation and Gene Codes Forensics, as reported by WXYZ Channel 7. Gene Codes had built its reputation on Sequencher, a DNA sequence assembly program released in 1991 that had become a staple in academic and government laboratories, according to Bionity. The company had also worked in forensic identification before, beginning development of forensic mitochondrial-DNA capabilities in 1997, per Gene Codes Forensics’ own historical account.
After watching the attacks, Cash reached out to federal and municipal contacts, offering technical help, according to WEMU 89.1. The New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner soon asked Cash to help organize the mountain of victim-identification data pouring in from Ground Zero. He described the request as a call to national service, per the WXYZ report.
Building a System From Bone Fragments
To meet the need, Gene Codes built the Mass Fatality Identification System, or M-FISys, according to a report published by Bio-IT World. Ann Arbor software programmers and computer scientists worked around the clock on the effort, and Cash personally flew updated versions of the software to New York each week, per the WXYZ account. New York police and fire crews sifted through roughly 17,000 tons of debris from Ground Zero, while recovery workers ultimately pulled more than 21,900 individual fragments of human remains from the site, most badly degraded by heat, crushing force, and chemical contamination, according to The Guardian…