Do you want to donate your body to science when you die? Well, you can either be poked and dissected by the medical field or you can donate your remains to the Anthropological Research Facility at the University of Tennesee in Knoxville.

The researchers at this body farm will lay your dead self in any number of environments, be it a muddy swamp, a grassy field, or a shady grove. Then they will let nature take its course, checking back to see how quickly and in what manner your body is decomposing.

Now, you may be thinking, "That's disgusting! I don't want people recording how I rot!" But, you will be helping to advance forensic science. Forensic scientists will be able to better determine how john or jane doe have died and when their time of death was. You will also help paleontologists determine what type of environments dinosaurs and other fossilized creatures lived (and died) in.

The Anthropological Research Facility was founded in 1972 by Dr. William M. Bass and currently holds over 235 skeletons.

Having grown up on a cattle ranch that disposed of its dead cows in a boneyard, I thought I was pretty immune to being grossed out by death and decay, but I was wrong wrong wrong. This weekend I saw a program on the Discovery Channel about the Body Farm and it fascinated me, captivated me, and above all grossed me totally and completely out.

Dr. William Bass had held a job for eleven years in Kansas as Forensic Anthropologist before he joined the staff at the University of Tennessee. In Kansas he'd dealt mainly with skeletal remains because of the lower population density. Bodies in Tennessee rarely were allowed to become skeletons before being discovered. All of a sudden Dr. Bass was being asked not only about the cause of death, but about how long the body had been lying there, and he found that there was virtually no information on the subject available. Dr. Bass asked the Dean of the University for a small piece of land where he could study how corpses decay. He got it, and in 1971 the University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Facility was formed. The name "Body Farm", coined by Knoxville police in the 1980's, took hold when novelist Patricia Cornwell did research and used the facility as the setting for a book of that title in 1994.

The Body Farm is fairly small, only 3 acres in size. It's located about a 3 minute walk from the University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville, Tennessee. At any given time up to 40 bodies are decaying at the site. Some are stuffed in car trunks, some left in the hot sun, some partially buried and some submerged in a pond. Students at the facility take note of insect actions, tissue degradation, amino acid breakdown and other processes that help pinpoint exactly how the human body decomposes under specific conditions. This is especially important in crime investigation where determining the precise time of death is often crucial.

The information gained at the Body Farm is so important that the FBI sends agents down once a year to train. Body Farm workers simulate five crime scenes for the agents and the agents' job is to discover the bodies and unravel the clues presented. Graduates of the Body Farm have been crucial in investigating high profile crimes such as Mexican drug-cartel murders, the mass graves in Kosovo, and murders all over the world.

Where do all these bodies come from? Some are corpses of criminals whose relatives won't pay to bury them. Some are unclaimed corpses. But more than 100 people, many of them academics and professionals, have signed up on their own for afterlife on the farm. There is a waiting list.

After the Body Farm is done with a corpse, the body is "processed" to be stored. The bones are steam cleaned in a mixture of bleach and detergent and placed in a small cardboard box (about 3'x1'x1'). These boxes are stored on wire racks in a small room in the Anthropology department at the University. Each is labeled with the sex, age, and cause of death. Names have been long forgotten by this time.

http://digital-eel.com/sirl/farm.htm
http://www.funerals.org/alert/bates.htm
http://www.cnn.com/2000/HEALTH/10/31/body.farm/
http://eroosevelths.pgcps.org/~horn/Down%20on%20the%20Body%20Farm.htm
http://dailybeacon.utk.edu/special/bodyfarm/default.html

We only started enbalming people a few thousand years ago. The Egyptians were the best — pull out the organs, stuff the body with herbs and salt, wrap it in cloth and bury it sealed tight in a dry place. Take moisture and oxygen from a body, and it mummifies. People who were too poor to be buried in pyramids were plopped unceremoniously in spaces cut from the earth; the salt turned them into mummies too. We've tried to preserve bodies with the methods we learned from the Egyptians but we can't quite get it right. Our mummies fall apart. There are Egyptian mummies that still have fingerprints.

People have been dying for millions of years but we understand little about the processes of decomposition.

Bill Bass founded the Forensic Anthropology Center at the University of Tennessee after misidentifying a corpse.

By the 1970s, Bass had been working at the medical center for some time identifying and studying remains from Tennessee and Kansas. Frequently, his work came from law enforcement personnel looking to pinpoint time-of-death for court cases. One day, Bass encountered the body of a middle-aged man, dead of gunshot, in almost perfect condition. Using what he knew about insect activity and the averages of decay, he placed time of death at several days before.

Further study revealed that he man had died during the American Civil War. His corpse had sat in a bog for 110 years. Decomposition can be a strange thing.

Bass did a little research and found to his surprise that there was little information, and certainly no facility, dedicated specifically to the study of human decay.

In the fall of 1972 Bass acquired a small plot of land and a single body from the university. Thirty-four years later the facility is still quite small — at just under three acres, one can cross it on foot in about five minutes — but at any time there are around 40 corpses laying about in various stages of decay. Much of what we know about postmortem change comes from Bill Bass.

So why "body farm?" Why not "University of Tennessee Center for Forensic Anthropology?"

The unfortunate nickname "body farm" comes from the Patricia Cornwell novel in which she cites work at Bass's facility as the hub of a fictional court case. I haven't read the book myself. The facility doesn't need a novel to be interesting.

"Body farm" does not convey all that Bass has learned. One is surprised at the knowledge that can come from watching bodies rot.

Bass's staff places donated bodies in a variety of situations. They stuff the bodies in car trunks, submerge them in ponds, leave them in sheds, hang them from trees. The bodies rot in the shade, in the sun, underground. Some are exposed to wildlife while others are allowed to ripen in peace. The staff recently found that leaving a body laying on top of a penny will leave a mark on the skin that looks like trauma. Bass says that his work has barely scratched the surface.

Naturally, Bass's work is of paramount interest to law enforcement agencies. Murder cases etc.

That is to say this is about more than morbiditiy.

Technophile? Read on.

Bass's facility has teamed with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory to develop a kind of electronic nose.

There is a network of perforated pipes that runs both above and below each of the bodies at the farm. Throughout decomposition, the body releases some 450 chemicals: proteins, fatty acids and the like. The chemicals are collected with triple-sorbent traps — small metal cylinders filled with weighted carbons. Bodies under different conditions release chemicals at different times. Staff at the Oak Ridge facility are working to create algorhithms based on these various release times which will frame a comprehensive portrait of decay. The ultimate goal is to find a particle that appears at the same time in all circumstances. As the folks at Wired put it, a half-life of death.

Donation

So you'd like to rot in a shed.

"All [bodies] are donated by family members or through medical schools. It's not like people are dropping down dead in the parking lot and we haul them in." ¹

Some of the volunteers are academics; some are criminals. Some are people like you and me.

The Center for Forensic Anthropology has archived over 400 remains. If you donate yourself you will be on a waiting list.

After a year of decomposition, bodies are cleaned. Cleaning involves stripping the bones of remaining flesh, both with hand tools and with boiling water. I learned from the Discovery Channel that boiling a seemingly-clean skull will leave a brown foam on top of the water.

Donated corpses do not have names. It's easier to watch "Corpse 19" rot than a man named Jerry who had a receeding hairline and a pug nose. You understand.

Each year, the facility holds a memorial service for those who have given themselves to knowledge.

The facility can be reached as follows:

Department of Anthropology
250 South Stadium Hall
Knoxville, TN 37996-0760 USA
Phone (865) 974-4408

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¹Dr. Arpad Vass for Wired.com.

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Sources

CNN
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/HEALTH/10/31/body.farm/

Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_Farm

LiveScience
http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/ap_051128_body_farm.html

University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Center
http://web.utk.edu/~anthrop/FACresources.html

Wired
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,60403-0.html
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,60403.html?tw=wn_story_page_next1