Body Farm
Good news! Now you can help advance the cause of medical science, even after you’re dead!:
A biological anthropology professor at the University of Northern Iowa, Tyler O’Brien, envisions turning some prime pasture in the Midwestern state into a body farm, where human bodies — buried, stuffed in car trunks or exposed to the elements — can provide scholars and criminalists with new benchmark data on human decay.
“This idea has strong scientific value,” O’Brien said. “To answer the question of how long a body has been dead, how long a person has been missing, is critical to criminal investigations.”
O’Brien is seeking a grant of $400,000 to $500,000 from the National Institute of Justice and other organizations to obtain the land and set up the project.
This is big! And it brings up a number of valid concerns:
1) Should the song now go, “Old McDonald had an arm, e-yi, e-yi-o”?.
2) Can farmers get money from the government NOT to grow body parts?
3) Who will guard the farm in case of Zombie infestation?
4) If a body was stuffed in a car trunk, do we need to bury the whole car? What if the car can be fixed up and given to the American Kidney Fund for a nice tax deduction? Does the farmer get the credit or does GMAC?
5) Regarding the $400,000 to $500,000: if they plan to open the body farm in New Jersey, it won’t go far. Maybe they should think of a body condominium or even a body refrigerator box.
There may be other moral and ethical issues and they’ll come to me eventually. But everyone will agree that the basic concept is sound and the scientist in question will only be the object of ridicule and assault and battery for no more than a few weeks or months.
