By Damian Purdy, The Manitoban
(University of Manitoba)

VANCOUVER (CUP)— Whoa, you
just died. Nice one. Only a moment
ago, there you were—alive, lying
in bed, in a clean, white room. Your
family was standing all around you,
vaguely bored.
It looked as
if you were
slowly being
eaten away by
the hospital
lights. And, then, all of a sudden, you
just up and died. Ah, well. No time to
cry or wax philosophic. There’s work
to be done.

You’re going to be a busy
body, if you'll excuse the pun. Are
you going to the army base so they
can use you for target practice?
Will you be physically transformed
into a penis? There are so many
possibilities. And it’s all because
you decided to donate your body to
science!

12

life after death

The fascinating lives of dead bo

—

Yes, you made a good decision
when you checked the box to donate
your body for “Medical Research
Purposes” on your Medicare card.
Indeed, if you had checked “Medical
Education Purposes” instead, you’d
likely be headed for med students
right now. And they’d poke and prod

One possible fate is “tolerance
testing,” in which bodies like you
are put through a series of incredibly
violent blunt impact trauma
experiments. It’s pretty sweet. In this
scenario, you would likely end up at
a research centre like Wayne State
University in Detroit, where you

because you decided to donate your body to science!”

you for a bit, before giving you a
respectful cremation. It’s nice and all,
but a touch boring, to be honest.
No, “Medical Research,” that’s
where the real action is. 1 commend
your courage in choosing it back
when you were alive. I mean, it’s
such a vague term that you might
be unaware of the post-mortem
adventures you’re about to have.
Let’s discuss a few thrilling options.

Tolerance Testing

get smashed to shit in automobile
crashes. An even more exciting
possibility is that you will end up
at NASA, where you will be crash-
landed inside futuristic spacecraft.
Indeed, NASA revealed in 2008
that it employs post-mortem human
subjects (just like you!) in “extreme
landing scenarios” for its still-
experimental Orion Capsule project.
Don’t be nervous, though.
Tolerance testing simply finds out
exactly what happens when the

> ROR COR Catt

 

soft contours of your flesh meets
other, less-forgiving, geometries at
incredible speeds. These findings are
then published in medical journals
under oddly alluring titles like
“Response of the Head, Neck and
Torso to Pendulum Impacts on the
Back” (2001) and “Tolerances of

“You’re going to be a busy body, if you'll excuse the pun. Are you going to the army base so they can use you
for target practice? Will you be physically transformed into a penis? There are so many possibilities. And it’s all

the Human Face to Crash Impact”
(1965). In the latter study, researchers
employed a catapult to hurl cadavers
face-first into blunt objects “with
increments of force until fracture
occurred.” The resulting “progressive
failure of facial structure” is coolly
documented, revealing neat-o tidbits
like “the frontal bone of one 66-year-
old head fractured with a force of 330
g on the 2.5 sq. inch block,” and that
“the teeth and maxilla can withstand
forces of more than 150 g if applied