So you want to donate your body to science.
Or, more accurately, science wants you to donate your body to science.
Because let's face it, donating your body to science might sound like an awesome idea,
but do you really know what happens if you do?
Here are all the different things your body could be doing after you die.
Loved ones who care about what happens to your remains after you've shuffled off may
experience varying degrees of horror knowing the ultimate fate of your body, how long it
remains out there in the hands of science, and whether or not they'll ever be able to
give it a proper burial.
You get to decide all that stuff in advance, though, which will hopefully make it easier
for your family to stomach.
In the U.K., for example, you have a couple different options.
You can give what's called "indefinite consent," which means whoever gets your body can keep
it for as long as they need it.
You can also permit short-term use of a few months, after which your body goes back to
your family.
Some contracts let the school or facility keep body parts indefinitely, which is cool
as long as you don't spend too much time wondering which body parts.
The consent you give is probably going to depend as much on what your family wants as
what you want.
For some people, a body is just an empty shell, while for others, it's still connected to
the person who once owned it, making saying "goodbye" difficult or even impossible without
it.
So it's probably smart to discuss your decision with your family, just so they're not blindsided
when the inevitable finally happens.
If there's anything awesome about death, it's the fact that you don't have to impress anyone
to get there.
Death is non-discriminatory.
"I don't want to go, I don't want to go…"
Unless you're donating your body to science.
Yep, scientists don't accept just any corpse, and most people don't qualify to become a
medical science cadaver.
Up to 70 percent of those who apply to BioGift Anatomical, for example, get rejected before
they've even died.
"I didn't get in?"
To earn the privilege of being posthumously cut up into little pieces, you must first
answer an extensive list of questions about your health and social life.
Most whole-body donation centers will exclude people who have communicable diseases like
HIV and hepatitis, but you may also get the postmortem boot if you're overweight.
And just because you get into the program while you're still living doesn't mean they'll
take you after you die.
Sometimes your manner of death excludes you.
If you had to be autopsied, for example, you're no good to medical students.
And if you had traumatic injuries because of a particularly violent car accident, you'd
probably be excluded, too.
Some who donate their bodies to science might not think too much about what specifically
could happen to their remains.
It's enough to just check a couple of boxes on your organ donor card and leave the rest
to the scientists.
If you choose "research and education," there's a pretty good chance you'll end up on a cold,
metal table in a classroom, attended by first-year medical students.
Disassembling a corpse is something every medical student can expect to do early in
the educational process, and with roughly 20,000 new doctors graduating med school every
single year, demand for willing dead people is especially high.
It's still hard to think about, since your body currently belongs to you and the idea
of it being cut into bits by a bunch of awkward students is sort of horrifying.
So it may comfort you to know that most schools teach respect along with anatomy.
At Stanford, for example, students are asked to participate in a moment of silence to honor
the lives of the people on the examining tables.
Suppose you've always been sort of claustrophobic.
The idea of a coffin gives you anxiety, and you don't like fire very much, either.
Or maybe you just think nature intended for corpses to decompose out in the open air.
Your family would probably get in trouble for abandoning your corpse in a national park,
but that's not the only way.
A body farm will grant your wish of natural decomposition, as long as you let them study
your rotting corpse over a period of weeks in the name of science.
The University of Tennessee's Body Farm, a 2.5-acre outdoor laboratory, is a temporary
resting place for around 150 corpses, some fresh, some skeletal, some horrifically in
between.
Some bodies are in water, some are in the sun, some are stuffed in the trunks of old
cars.
"People donate their bodies to science end up submerged in a pond?
Crammed in a car?"
What's the point of all this, besides helping the Body Farm earn the title of creepiest
place in the universe?
Forensic scientists can use the information to build decomposition timelines for bodies
that have been left in different conditions.
That information can point to a time of death and help solve murders.
So your choice to decompose au naturel is not just a zen, one-with-the-Earth decision,
it's also a way for you to fight crime after death.
Some people donate their bodies to science specifically for the purpose of becoming skeletons,
which is actually pretty cool when you think about it.
It's a kind of immortality.
You'll remain standing for decades after your death, and maybe even longer than that.
During that time, you get to gaze creepily at first-year med students.
Hopefully, you'll occasionally scare someone who stayed late in the lab one night.
Some groups take bodies specifically for the purpose of making them into skeletons.
The Maxwell Museum of Anthropology is one such place.
Some facilities will take just about anyone, while others are looking for bones that have
a more scientific value.
The skeletons of cancer patients, for example, can provide valuable insight into bone metastasis,
while skeletons with osteoporosis can help scientists discover potential treatments.
For the would-be world traveler, there are what's known as "body brokers," which are
kind of like junk yard operators.
They pick up dead bodies, disassemble them, and then sell off the parts.
Unlike whole-body donation centers, a body broker often sells internationally.
There's actually a huge market for dead Americans, and there's a pretty simple reason why: because
cadavers are in short supply in nations where customs and traditions dictate what can be
done with a dead body.
Some cultures insist on treating their members with reverence, but cutting up dead Americans
is totally cool.
Different institutions are interested in different body parts, which makes selling them piecemeal
more practical.
What's worse, families don't always understand that their loved ones might be dismembered
and sent overseas, and not every body broker is on the up and up, either.
In early 2018, a body broker named Arthur Rathburn was convicted for selling body parts
infected with HIV and hepatitis, and keeping them in, quote, "grisly, unsanitary conditions."
So if you do decide that body brokering is for you, at least try to be selective.
If you'd rather travel the world more or less intact, you could consider donating your body
to a human body exhibit.
Corpses in these fascinating but morbid exhibits are plastinated, which basically just means
that fluids are replaced with liquid plastic, a process that maintains the body's natural
appearance.
"No, I don't think anyone will notice.
But I think you're gonna need a little bondo on the chin, babe."
"I gotta get to the hardware store."
Plastination was made famous by Gunther von Hagens' "Body Worlds," which displays plastinated
bodies in various states of looking like they've been flayed alive.
Not everyone thinks displaying plastinated human bodies is a great idea, but people on
the donor list for plastination seem to think of it as a kind of immortality.
It's sort of like being the skeleton in the biology classroom, only you get to stare at
people with your actual, plastinated eyes instead of the gaping sockets of your empty
skull.
If you love this idea, you can register to be a donor through the Institute for Plastination,
but that's not a guarantee you'll get to be a part of the show.
The institute has more than 13,000 registered donors waiting to be immortalized in plastic,
and very few openings in their traveling exhibit.
Instead, it promises you'll be used for, quote, "medical training of doctors."
So you might not be a plastinated star or anything, but you'll still get to do some
good.
Tissue donation is closely related to organ donation, but the difference is tissue can
be harvested up to 24 hours after death, while most organs need to be harvested right away
because they will rapidly begin to deteriorate when starved of oxygen.
Tissue donation can potentially save lives, just like organ donation can, but tissue donation
is also big business, which means someone else is going to be profiting off your death.
If that sounds kind of unsavory, it's because it is.
The tissue industry as a whole is worth about $1 billion annually, and one human body is
worth about $80,000 in tissues.
So your generous donation of your mortal remains might feel altruistic, but that doesn't mean
someone isn't profiting from your death.
Worse, there's no guarantee your tissues are going to save someone's child or father.
They're just as likely to be used to give someone extra-luscious lips or fully functioning
man-bits.
"You keep your pencil in your pocket.
You know what I mean?"
So, you might want to choose your tissue harvesting company carefully.
Nonprofits are more likely to treat your body with respect rather than as a gold mine.
Most people don't realize that donating your body to science doesn't always mean for medical
research.
Other industries depend on cadavers, too, like the auto industry, for example.
Sure, a crash-test dummy can tell you a lot about what might happen to a human body in
an accident.
"You could learn a lot from a dummy.
Buckle your safety belt."
But it can't tell you everything.
For that you need an actual human body.
Automakers don't actually procure cadavers to use in their own tests, mostly because
that would be really bad press for them.
Instead, manufacturers distance themselves from the whole dead body thing by asking universities
to do cadaver testing on their behalf, and then they sit around and wring their hands
hoping no one will leak a video of a real human getting mushed in their cars.
It is important research, and as a human crash-test dummy you do save lives — maybe not in the
same way as an organ donor, but helping automakers build safer cars can indirectly save a lot
of people.
If becoming a crash-test dummy seems too gross and violent, you might want to go out of your
way to make sure your corpse doesn't end up in the hands of the military.
Why does the military need corpses?
Because they need to know if their new boot design will stop soldiers from losing feet
if they step on a landmine, and the best way to do that is to make a cadaver step on a
landmine.
This isn't usually a scenario that will please your family, and the military knows that,
which is probably why some corpses pass through a sort of gray market before arriving at their
final destination.
According to the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, that's how some bodies got from the
Tulane School of Medicine to the military, which paid roughly $30,000 per body.
Tulane wasn't even aware this was happening.
It transferred bodies it, quote, "couldn't use" to a body broker, assuming incorrectly
that the bodies would go from there to medical schools.
That's not to say the military doesn't obtain most of its corpses legitimately, or that
you shouldn't register to be exploded in a land mine simulation if you want to commit
yourself to potentially saving soldiers in the line of duty.
It's still a noble cause if you can get past the whole exploding thing.
Funerals are expensive.
A traditional funeral with a burial and a headstone costs between $7,000 and $10,000.
Cremation is cheaper, but it will still run you at least $1,500, which is a lot of money
for some people.
Given those hard realities, it's unsurprising that some people just don't claim their loved
ones' bodies.
Whole-body donation is one possible solution to the problem.
Some institutions will cremate donor bodies after they've been released and provide a
short funeral service, complete with a chaplain, at no cost to the family.
There won't be any big screen TV with images of the departed on loop or stories from grieving
loved ones, but if you think the greater gift is saving your family the expense of all those
flowers and a shiny wooden coffin, that's a pretty good reason to donate your body to
science.