Just when I had made up my mind to be cremated and was about to pick up the phone to call the Neptune Society for details about how to go about making pre-death arrangements, an article in the Sacramento Bee caught my attention. Officials at UC Davis and Cal State University Chico are seriously looking into developing a "body farm" somewhere in northern California. In case you haven't heard, body farms are large open areas with a variety of vegetation, water features, and soil conditions where dead bodies can be left in various states of exposure to the elements which would also include small animals, bugs, and bacteria of all sorts. The idea is to simulate real situations where people are killed and left to return to the earth without benefit of embalming or cremation or the kind services of an undertaker. Local and state law enforcement is interested in this venture because all the "good" data on decaying bodies now comes from a body farm in Tennessee. Another farm recently opened in North Carolina and there is already a waiting list of 2,000 people hoping to not be buried there.
While I understand the need to have scientific forensic data, running experiments out in mother nature's laboratory seems about as smart as allowing a bunch of high-school seniors to test the safety features of a nuclear power generator. Science is usually done best under conditions that are carefully controlled and monitored. I hope the body farmers understand that.
Except of course that people (and every other living thing plant or animal) has been decaying over and below ground for the last few billion years. It's hardly new.
ReplyDeleteAt first I thought you were just talking about natural burials, underground yes, but in a minimal coffin so that the body decays rapidly, basically the way it was done for millenia.
That had been sounding exciting to me, but I think I'd really like to burned on a funeral pyre on Bolsa Chica Beach. What do you suppose my chances are?
While I agree, as a scientist (yes I am going to call myself a scientist), that many scientific experiments should be done in a controlled environment, not everything can be done in the lab. Ask any ecologist or evolutionary biologist.
ReplyDeleteIn a nice sterile lab you can test to reproducibility and reliability of experiments, but Mother Nature is extremely hard to reproduce, as there are so many variables.
This is exactly why if you are trying to reproduce what happens to a body when it has been left in the woods for weeks before being found, you need to actually put a body in the woods. Usually you want to eliminate unnecessary variables, but when you are studying all variables of nature there is nothing to eliminate.
No one facility is perfect for everyone, which is why it's great to have several around the country as the environment in Tennessee or North Carolina is not the same as California.
I agree that a funeral pyre on Bolsa Chica beach would be a great sendoff. But after watching An Inconvenient Truth, I'd be worried about adding to the world's greenhouse gases.
ReplyDeleteAs far as Steven's comments, I can see your point. I just wonder how we can really know what a body looks like decaying in nature when a move of 10 feet might change the outcome so much. Of course, if they have enough bodies scattered all over, they will get the data they need.
Steve wanted me to make a post about this, as one of my hobbies is studying abnormal psychology and especially as it relates to violent crime and I had heard a bit about the body farm from my readings and crime TV shows. The body farm specializes in the study of human remains in a variety of situations, not only just left in open areas but partially buried, placed in cars, etc. Not only do they study a wide variety of conditions, they also develop and test new technology such as ground penetrating radar for use to locate burial sites. They also assist in training cadaver dogs. One of my favorite websites for my... abnormal hobby is Court TV's www.crimelibrary.com. An interesting article they have on the founder Dr. Bill Bass can be found at: http://www.crimelibrary.com/criminal_mind/forensics/
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Thank you, Lisa, for this additional information. That puts the idea of a body farm in a much more interesting perspective.
ReplyDeleteLisa, didn't the good Dr. write a book about the body farm? (I think that was even it's title). Seems like I heard part of a review/interview on NPR (little too gross for me, I turned it off...)
ReplyDeleteI had thought that the only books written by Dr. Bass were fiction, but I looked on Amazon and found that he has a memoir of sorts that talks about his work, in addition to a couple fiction books based on his experiences. I noticed in the description they said "not for the faint-of-stomach." Studying death in this way is certainly not a pretty business. That's why I want to be cremated... I don't fancy the idea of becoming a rotting corpse. Yuck. :-)
ReplyDeleteI wonder if anyone has done a comparitive analysis of the relative greenhouse emissions of a pyre vs. a crematorium, a pyre vs. byproducts of embalming, or a fire vs. just livind and driving 60 miles/day for another week. Somehow I doubt the pyre would really be the largest concern. ;)
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