Science after 9/11: How Research Was Changed by the September 11 Terrorist Attacks

Two months after al Qaeda terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan on September 11, 2001, analytical chemist John Butler found himself working late nights in his lab, developing DNA assays to identify 911 victims from the tens of thousands of charred human remains recovered at Ground Zero. Thinking back, he still clearly remembers the sense of rising to a national need that was shared by dozens of researchers recruited to the same difficult problem. "People wanted to step up and help the country," he says.

Ten years on, Butler's solitary effort at National Institute of Standards and Technology has grown to a large research group working on the forensics of blended, degraded or soiled DNA, and U.S. expertise developed in the wake of 9/11 has also been exported worldwide, put to use identifying victims of mass atrocities in Africa, Asia, Bosnia and Iraq.

It is just one example of how a research direction blossomed as a result of 9/11. Scientists and science policy experts say the federal government's response to terrorist events in 2001, both the September attacks and the anthrax letters in October, have had a profound effect on U.S. research in areas as diverse as forensics, biodefense, infectious diseases, public health, cyber security, geology and infrastructure, energy, and nuclear weapons. Even the social sciences have been affected by the emergence of "terrorism studies" and the new emphasis on the threat in the field of risk analysis.

A major conduit for the shifts is the availability of money: The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), created by consolidating 22 federal services and agencies in 2002 in direct response to September 11, had a science budget that peaked at $1.3 billion in 2006 before falling again to about $700 million in 2011. Key science-funding agencies including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Energy, also put money into research motivated by security concerns (amounting to a total homeland security (this number does not refer to DHS but to homeland security funding across all agencies) research budget of $7.3 billion in 2011) and a small amount of the U.S. Department of Defense money associated with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq ended up in the hands of researchers as well—for example, by funding work on explosives detection and weaponry.