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The Body Farm
How you gonna keep "em down on the farm? Easy, they're dead. At the University of Tennessee, one can find at any given time about 40 human corpses, stuffed into car trunks, lying in the sun, buried in shallow graves, covered with brush or submerged in ponds. They're part of the university's Forensic Anthropology Facility, better known as "The Body Farm." Retired forensic anthropologist William Bass started The Body Farm, which is located on a three-acre spread near the UT stadium surrounded by razor wire and a wooden fence, in 1971. Students and professors use the facility to study how decomposition affects the body's organs and tissues.
The farm has also been long used to help law enforcement authorities and medical examiners pinpoint the time of death in real life crimes. In one recent experiment, researchers surgically inserted bullets into numerous corpses in an effort to develop bullets that would resist corrosion from the acids inside a dead body and help police solve long-ago crimes. Bodies come from a variety of sources -- unclaimed corpses from medical examiners' offices and outright donations. Over 300 people have willed their bodies to the facility, with more coming with each fresh wave of publicity.
Chill Out, Man
Cryogenics is the study of extremely cold temperatures, and in recent years the technology has been used to freeze the dearly departed in the hope that a cure for whatever did them in, including old age, will one day be found. One of the more notable of these human sno-cones is baseball legend Ted Williams, who is hanging upside down in a nitrogen-filled tank at a cryogenic plant in Arizona, waiting to be thawed out and put back into the game. Skeptics abound, including members of Williams' family, and the Alcor Life Extension Foundation where Williams, along with dozens of other corpses, resides has come under fire for fraud and quackery.
Not everyone's post-life freezing is so high-tech. Example number 1: Bredo Morstel. "Grandpa Bredo," as he's affectionately called, is packed on ice in a shed in Nederland, CO. Thousands of people from all over the country gather at Nederland every March for the three-day Frozen Dead Guy Days Festival, where folks compete in coffin races, Grandpa Morstel look-alike contests, and pluck down $10 to tour the shed where Morstel resides.
Mortsel died in 1989, and his grandson, Trygve, had his body cryogenically frozen at an institute in California. Several years later, Trygve moved from Norway to the US to build an earthquake, wind, bomb, fire and flood-proof house in Nederland. He decided to bring his frozen grandfather with him, and stored him in a shed behind his disaster-proof home. Trygve was longhaired, wild-eyed and outspoken, and believed that bathing in ice water and taking coffee enemas could prolong one's life. He became a well-known character in the Boulder area and a bit of a troublemaker. In 1994 he was deported back to Norway, leaving his frozen grandfather behind.
When the Nederland town council discovered they had a frozen dead guy on their hands, an emergency meeting was held, and an ordinance was passed stating it was illegal to have "the whole or any part of the person which is not alive on one's property." The ordinance, however, did not cover Grandpa Bredo, who was, um, grandfathered in. Soon, the town of Nederland realized they had more than just a frozen dead guy on their hands -- they had the makings of a great tourist trap. The town hired a local technician to keep Bredo's temperature at 90 degrees below zero, and the ramshackle shed was replaced with a more presentable abode. Frozen Dead Guy Tours are given monthly, and the Frozen Dead Guy Days Festival is now an annual event. For more information, check out www.frozendeadguy.com.
In The Name Of Science, Or At Least A Bigger Penis
