The DNA testing stage is over. They can't do any more.

The medical examiner's office has largely ended its effort to identify the remains of those killed at the World Trade Center site on Sept. 11, 2001, leaving more than a thousand victims unidentified.

"We've finished making identifications for the World Trade Center," Robert Shaler, director of forensic biology at the medical examiner's office, told the New York Daily News in a story published Wednesday.

The forensic effort failed to identify any remains of more than 1,100 victims, or almost half of the 2,749 who died there.

They do hold out the possibility of future testing if new methods are developed.

Shaler has said that the DNA effort could be reopened if new scientific processes were developed.

"If three years from now somebody comes up with something ... that really looks like it's going to work, then we're going to be poised to go after it," he told The Associated Press in 2003.

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"I'm still driven by the families," Shaler said in 2003. "When I see these people, they look at me with eyes that say, 'Did you find her yet?' But when you're only turning out a couple a week or four, five a month, it's hard."

In most cases, victims whose remains were not identified have been legally declared dead by the court anyway, based on documentation that they were at the trade center or on the hijacked airplanes.

It's a strange feeling, to read that something has "ended" at the site of the World Trade Center. It's like there was a before, and an after, but now the after has ended, and there's... nothing. And for all those families who will never have the hard, cold evidence they need to close the book - I can't even imagine what it must feel like. I have a hard enough time grappling with it as an observer.