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Qaeda leader. officials said the bin laden family dna was used to make the identification. it all sounds very "csi." left some people wondering can dna testing really be done so fast? chief medical correspondent and certified medical examiner dr. sanjay gupta joins me now. sanjay, i had no idea it could be done that fast. it seems like the government was able to confirm a match very, very quickly. >> yeah, you know, typically when youre talking about dna sequencing thats the process that can tak...

There are apparently photographs of bin ladens body and his burial at sea but no word yet that they are going to be made public. a lot of people would like to see some sort of evidence. a lot of people talking about that on twitter tonight. i posted that. you can join in at andersoncooper. joining me is gary berntsen, author of the book "jawbreaker," former leader of the cia team that was actually searching for osama bin laden in afghanistan and tora bora. and cnns national security adviser fran...

Incredibly quickly hp how so? >> well, its interesting because when people think about dna sequencing thats typically what takes a very long time. but to do a match, to actually take, for example, in this case they say maybe a siblings dna, that siblings going to share about 50% of their dna with their brother or sister. so right away you have specific areas you can sort of zero in on and say look, are there similarities between these two samples of dna? between everybody, anderson, more than 99...

Several years ago in boston, where she was apparently receiving treatment, that the fbi had subpoenaed her body so they could get a dna sample. certainly, a sisters dna would be very valuable compared to other family members, correct? >> yeah. if this is a full sibling -- and im not sure if theyre talking about a full sister or this was a half sibling, for example, yeah, obviously if that could -- if you know for sure these people are related, thats very valuable in terms of referencing this, ma...

And so this is -- the bin laden familys a very large family. they live in countries all around the world. some of his sons had been in custody. and sometimes that was with countries that were allies of the united states. and so the intelligence community, working with our allies around the world, had gone about collecting dna samples from family members of bin laden in indication they were ever needed for an occasion such as this. >> do you know if these were with the permission of the family me...

Able to confirm a match very, very quickly. >> yeah, you know, typically when youre talking about dna sequencing thats the process that can take a long time, really sequencing someones entire genome. this is different. what theyre doing here is theyre trying to actually look at -- trying to create a match here. so you know, if you look at most people, you know, we share about 99% of our dna. thats in common. so instead theyre focusing on areas that are different between people. if you have some ...

Do they need to run tests on all the samples simultaneously, or i assume they would have done that ahead of time and therefore just needed to compare the dna from bin laden to the samples they already had. >> thats exactly right. so essentially, if you have known samples from known siblings or known relatives of in this case the person, bin laden, you basically create reference samples. so you have all of those relatives or reference samples sort of lined up and then you bring in this new sample...

More than 99% of our dna is going to be the same. so the key for them in terms of the sort of genetic fingerprinting or genetic matching as they call it is to focus on the area that is different. and that could make a much shorter time than, for example, sequencing the entire dna. its not going to be perfect. no ones going to say with 100% accuracy because it is still a little bit of an imperfect science. but thats a little bit of how they do it. >> well, officials have said they compared bin la...

Who you think it is. no one will come out and say, though, anderson, 100% because despite all of what ive just described its still an imperfect science. >> there are also unconfirmed reports right now that one of the samples came from his sister, who died from cancer several years ago in boston, where she was apparently receiving treatment, that the fbi had subpoenaed her body so they could get a dna sample. certainly, a sisters dna would be very valuable compared to other family members, correc...

Now. you know, it is said that his body was i.d.d with multiple dna samples, and they are 99.9% sure and is that possible given the transport time of the dna samples themselves? >> yes. the thing is that people say it takes a couple of days to do the testing. but if you really want to do it, and have high priority, you can turn around a test in 4 to 6 hours. >> that is the processing time? >> yes. four to six hours. and then you would compare it, and then you have to compare it to another sample...