Even just walking to and from the convention center here in New Orleans, it’s impossible to miss the fact that this city is still recovering from the mass disaster of Hurricane Katrina last year. Lots of businesses are empty or shut down. Workers are still clearing away rubble and there’s small damage on some of the buildings. And this isn’t even the part of town that was most affected by the storm.

Today, a handful of geneticists talked about their work to help the city recover. The geneticists were part of the team that tried to reunite families with their lost loved ones – whether dead in the storm or missing in its wake.

Most of the geneticists who helped out were volunteers. They spoke to families who were looking for lost relatives. They would help the families draw pedigrees, give DNA samples, and search for missing people who evacuated to other states.

But a huge part of their job was also to convince people to cooperate with a system that was failing them in so many other ways. The Federal Emergency Management Agency became notorious in Katrina’s wake, for its slow and bungled response to the storm. The geneticists even had to use their own cell phones to contact families, because the phones at the Family Assistance Center were registered to FEMA – and the families were so fed up with FEMA that when they saw it appear on their caller ID, they wouldn’t answer the phone. “People were furious,” said geneticist Amanda Sozer. And it was hard to explain why the identification process sometimes moved slowly, or didn’t give definite answers. “They thought it would be like [the TV show] CSI,” she said.

In the end, geneticists were able to help most families find their loved ones. And maybe, they hope, their work will help build faith in science and scientists. Siobhan Dolan of the March of Dimes says that the public so often hears stories about genetics being used in sketchy ways – for cloning, or for things like sex selection in reproductive medicine. “Sometimes people think we’re mad scientists,” Dolan said. “But there could be nothing more universal than reuniting families in devastating circumstances. It was important to show that this technology can be used for tremendous good.”