Stuff You Should Know - How to Donate Your Body to Science

Episode Date: September 1, 2015

Donating your whole body to further science and medicine is probably the best thing you could do with your corpse. Which is why the industry that handles those gifts need regulating. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca.host.

This season on Running the Break with CJ and Alex. For Meek Mill, so obviously huge ties to Philly was at a Sixers game recently. And in what seemed like a real life curb your enthusiasm as an episode, he accidentally tripped a ref sitting courtside as the ref was running back up court. You know what CJ? I gotta say, I feel like that should be a technical foul, one free throw for the opposing team. Yes, if you rep your town and your team as much as you do Meek Mill, he's a Sixer, right?

So the opposing team's got to take free throws or unless, you know, if we're going off of the curb episode, does Meek have the discography of that compares to like Seinfeld tapes that he could bring to the ref's, you know, hospital bed, shout out to curb. That was one of the greatest episodes ever. Listen to Running the Break with CJ and Alex on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by FanDuel, make every moment more with FanDuel Sportsbook, an official partner of the NBA.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and there's Jerry, so it's Stuff You Should Know. How's it going? It's going okay. I'm like a little congested. Oh yeah?

Yeah. I'm not sick. Just congested. I don't know if you ever admit when you're sick anyway, so who would know? I'm not, though. Look, I've got like tons of energy. Look, well, I had that weird cough for like three weeks when I got back from Oklahoma. It was very weird.

And it wasn't, I was never sick. It was just a post-nasal drip. Oh, really? Maybe from allergies or something? I don't know. Maybe. It was weird. I just couldn't kick it.

But I've kicked it. That's great. I can tell. Yeah. Well, I hope you feel better even though you're not sick. Thanks, man. Sure. I'm not sick.

I don't know. Because if you were sick, you could possibly die and donate your body to science. It's definitely true. I could. And I may. I probably will. Yeah. When we did the organ donation podcast quite a number of years ago, this came up.

And I think we may have even said, let's do one on donating our whole body. And here it is. Years later promised. I can tell you that Yumi most decidedly wants to donate her body to science. Yeah. I think I do, too. Yeah. It's a great thing to do.

Agreed. Especially if by the time we all kick the bucket, they have a regulatory body overseeing this. It might be nice. It would be nice. It'd make me feel a little better. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, they do point out in the article like the thought of some people are just turned off by the thought of your body being cut up. I don't care. No. I think that is the first mental hurdle that you have to go past to say, I think I will donate my body to science. People are going to be pouring over every part of your body naked while you're dead on a table.

And that's before they cut you open, pull everything out, cut your hand off your feet, your head, all that stuff. Yeah. I think I would, I wonder if you can have a stipulation like to be covered and like have my privates covered. I'd have a merkin stipulation. That's not bad. I have a sock claws.

The other hurdle is, and I never really thought about this, was people just thinking about like jerk medical students, like joking around and stuff. Yeah. So apparently that would be an enormous, at least like doing it for the class. It's an ethical breach. And what I understand, it would be a very, that's very taboo. Yeah. This has taken very seriously.

Yeah. It's in very poor taste. Yeah. And so if you say donate your body to a university and it ends up being used for anatomical study among gross anatomy students, right? Yeah. Probably they're going to know your name. They're going to know how you died.

They're going to refer to you and talk to you by your name. So you will be a person to them. You're not just a cadaver, you're not just a lump of meat. Yeah. It sounds like they go out of their way to be very respectful of what you've done for them. Right. They're taught to.

The instructors set that example. I read about one at, I can't remember the university, there's a link to it on the podcast page, where the instructor, they make like a very big point of pointing out that this is a gift. This person gave you, medical student, the gift of their cadaver so that you can become a good doctor and save other people's lives. And make money. This is a huge gift and it's to be treated with respect.

Yeah. Totally. And also frequently, most of these programs hold some sort of annual ceremony to kind of thank all of the people who just to honor them. Yeah. For the cadaver ball. Exactly. The dead man's dance.

Yeah. It's great that people get loaded. Can't find a date, no problem. So once you get past that hurdle, the idea of being poked and prodded and looked at by medical students, there is another hurdle that people face too, religious types at least, that some religions prohibit this kind of thing. Who? Do you know?

Well, Islam. Okay. Right. Says, no, you can't do that. Like the body's not to be cut up or dissected or messed with after death. But they said organ donation's okay. I didn't see that. Oh, really?

Under Sharia law, it doesn't look like you're supposed to do anything to the dead body except take care of it. Okay. I think that stuff varies though with this religion. The thing I, what I ran across said like, no, you can't, you definitely can't donate your body. It didn't say anything about donating organs, but from the context, it would seem like organ donation would be a no-no as well.

Jehovah's Witness very famously do not accept or donate blood transfusions or any parts of blood. They consider that blood is basically life as a gift from God and you are not to be messing with it with blood. But if all of the blood is removed from the body to prevent it from being used for transfusions, the body is a-okay-to-go to be donated to say like a medical school as far as Jehovah's Witnesses are concerned. Most other religions are like, do it.

Why would you not? Yeah. And I love how this article says Baptist. They break it down to like... I think the author may have been Baptist. You think? That's why I took... Because it's weird as not to say Christianity as a whole and to break it down into denominations.

Right. Because he said Baptist. And Catholic. And to say it's an act of charity, I've never heard that I grew up Baptist. Maybe you missed that Sunday. No, I didn't miss any Sundays, my friend. You didn't? Nope.

There aren't any like hard and fast statistics because body donations can be donated to medical universities and colleges, to the U.S. government, to private firms. Who cares what it's donated to? Surely there is a central authority that all cadaver donations go through. No. Isn't that nuts? I don't think so. It's totally nuts, man.

Think about it. Organ donation, heavily regulated, lots of oversight, no money is exchanging hands. Or if it is, it's like just the bare minimum. There's no free market associated with this whatsoever. And everything goes through the central authority. There's at least on paper, there's a group that knows everything that's going on. Every organ that's being transplanted makes total sense. But when you talk about like bones, tendons, eyeballs, I don't know if those are organ

donation or not. But whole bodies, this stuff is wrong to say that there is no regulation or oversight. There is. It's just not anywhere near as strict as organ donation. It's not taken nearly as seriously. We have a real problem with that. I don't have a problem with that. I think the reason why is because organ donations are being used to put into other people.

You're not taking a whole body donated to science. It's only for cadaver purposes. That is not true. What were they? They actually used parts on other people? Like what? Like bones, ligaments, tendons, muscles. But not like any sort of tissue or organ.

Like from a cadaver? Yeah. No. Not the organ itself, but they are taking like say a bone from you, the dead guy who donated your body. It might end up in a living recipient. And you may be like totally fine with that. That's cool, right?

I want to help somebody. I didn't think I'd be able to donate my organs, which is something we'll talk about later. So that's great. That's helping them out. The other problem with it is somebody may have profited from your donation and that's where my problem comes from. I think donating your body to science or for reuse in some way, shape, or form is going to help other people is wonderful.

But the fact that there is not enough oversight or regulation and that there is a free market that's associated with this because it's illegal to sell a body part. But you could say charge a handling fee and they frequently do. It leads to this free market in body parts, but that starts out as an act of love, a gift, a donation. And then somewhere down the line, somebody can profit from that. That's horrible. But there is handling.

Like transporting a body isn't free. No, there isn't. Someone has to pay for that. There isn't. It's true. So this oversight committee or this government agency should say, here's how much it costs. We know how much an airline charges. We know how much it costs to ship a body.

We know how much it costs to take a piece of bone, a femur from somebody, and then transport it somewhere else. Right? Yeah. And if it's US government, it'll be $80,000 for a bone. I totally disagree with that. I mean, think about organ procurement. Nobody's like, there's a free gray market that's growing up over organ procurement.

That's not what happens in this country. But when it comes to tissue and stuff like that, it's a problem. But it also, here's the other thing, Chuck. It doesn't just affect donors. It affects people who haven't donated their body because year after year after year, some news article comes up where some crematorium has been stealing body parts and selling them in this gray market. Yeah.

Same's true for organs, though. There's a black market. Yeah. It is true. I just have the impression that it's much harder to do with organ procurement than it is with tissue and tissue. Like a whole body donation is considered tissue. So sorry about that.

That's right. So I think the sentence I was about to finish was there are somewhere around 20,000 whole bodies donated per year, they think. In the US, right? Yeah. But that's, like I said, not an exact number because, like you said, there is no US government body watching all this. And so 20,000 sounds like a pretty decent amount, right?

Apparently not enough. Apparently, there is a real dearth of cadavers. Oh, yeah. I think a lot of people don't realize you can really donate your whole body. And probably the idea seems a little daunting or weird or whatever. So my hope is that just from us talking about this, more people will come to see it as something that's totally doable because from what I ran across, it really is totally doable. Totally doable.

All right. Well, we'll take a break here. When we come back, we will talk a little bit about the history of whole body donation. Hey, everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for

her travel. But yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. Just about everything you want to do in life depends on what you know. To earn more, learn more at Houston Community College. HCC has more than 300 programs. You can take courses that transfer to a major university or you can jump into an exciting career field in just two years or less.

HCC has cutting-edge programs like artificial intelligence and robotics, process technology, cybersecurity, solar technology, business, health sciences, and more. Spring classes are registering now, so frame your future at hccs.edu. All right, let's go back to the 19th century, early 19th century. In Britain, they're using animals a lot of times or criminals, dead bodies of people that have been hanged. Well, yeah, that was the only way that you could get your hands on a cadaver as a medical school was if it was the body of an executed criminal.

That's right. That was it. Or it's a pig or some other animal. Right, and a pig, great. It's very satisfying to cut into a pig with a scalpel. He knows that, but you're not going to learn as much about the human body from cutting open a pig as you would from cutting open a human body. No.

They decided they needed more bodies because capital crimes had dropped, and so grave robbing became a common practice. Still is a common practice, but it still happens in some parts of the world. Back then they were called resurrectionists, and a lot of times it was slaves that were being, having their graves robbed. Yeah. Did you read that Smithsonian article I sent you? Yeah, I read that one, and there's a documentary out too made by Dr. Sean Utzi of Virginia

Commonwealth University, Go Rams, called Until the Well Runs Dry Medicine and the Exploitation of Black Bodies. In it he talks about someone named Chris Baker, who was a famous resurrectionist in Virginia, who would rob slave graves basically, and it was robbing, but they still, it wasn't a crime because slaves had no rights even after death. Right, and apparently they would employ slaves to do this because slaves couldn't be arrested for grave robbing slaves' graves somehow, at least in Georgia. Oh yeah, because you sent this other case of, what was his name?

Anderson Harris. Yeah, he was a medical college of Georgia in Augusta, they discovered in 1989 in one of the old buildings. Do you remember that? A bunch of bones. Do you remember when that happened? I was in high school, dude, I didn't watch the news. Were you like a 10th grader watching?

I was like 8th to 9th grade, I just remember, I was like, what? Because when they found all these bones, they were like, what is going on here? And then they figured out, oh, these were old anatomical specimens that had been robbed from the grave. Yeah, apparently he was employed because he was huge and strong, and he could rob a grave by himself, which usually needed a few people to rob a grave, but he was an efficient gray robin machine and made a lot of money and educated himself and rose up somewhat in white society, but was not really accepted by either whites or blacks.

Yeah, the Smithsonian article puts it, he occupied a liminal place between black and white society. He was shunned by everybody, but also grudgingly respected and feared. Need article. Yeah, it was pretty cool. And this Chris Baker apparently, Dr. Sean Utzi says, along with things like the Tuskegee experiments, he says that he thinks that medical colleges accepting grave robbed bodies of slaves is one of the reasons he says that some African Americans today have like lingering

suspicions about doctors in general. Oh, really? Yeah. Makes sense. And he says that that's a big reason that he feels like black people die more of preventable disease. Because of a fear of doctors? Yeah, maybe a mistrust of doctors after things like the Tuskegee experiments and grave robbing

of God, slave graves. Gotcha. So it sort of makes sense. So pretty interesting. He's the professor of, I think the head of African American studies at UVA, or not UVA, but Virginia Commonwealth, VCU. So grave robbing became very, very widespread, not just in the U.K., but also in American. I think you said around the world, right?

Yeah. And just deals being like, if you ever watch the NIC, like the police make deals with the hospital, like they find a body, they get a little money on the side. Right. It was just basically, how can we get our hands on a body? Exactly. And finally, people figured out like, oh, well, this prohibition on dissecting human bodies is leading to grave robbing, which now that we compare the two side by side, grave

robbing is way worse. So let's just make it, if somebody wants to donate their body, or we can let that happen. And that's, that change happened. Let's set up a government branch to screw it up. I'm telling you, man. I don't know, man, just for me personally, I just don't trust our government to handle something as nuanced and delicate as a part of the end of life industry. I just think it would be a typical, inefficient bureaucratic nightmare.

And that's the last thing people need when they're dealing with like the death of a family member. That's just me. I think the Oregon Procurement System network in place now is a sterling example of what could be done. It's great. Yeah, I don't know too much about the financials behind it. Well, that's the thing.

Like I agree with you, it does cost a certain amount of money to operate. But then you could have not for profit businesses running these things, right? So a not for profit business still creates income, but that goes into the business that doesn't enrich shareholders or anything like that, right? So with for profit companies, and there are, I'm not slamming all for profit companies, there are for profit body donation companies out there that are great. Yeah. Right?

But I'm just saying that the fact that that is allowed to me allows this free market in body parts that I don't think should exist. There is not one process because there is not one governing body. So it depends on who you're dealing with. If it's a medical school, that's a good option. Could be a government agency, could be a private group like you were talking about. But what you're going to start out doing is filling out a lot of paperwork. You need to make sure your family knows and is on board and be in your will and everyone's

cool with all this. Yeah, because if you go on the Mayo Clinic website and look how to donate your body, one of the things they say is if your next of kin opposes it, we're not going to accept your body. Well, it's just too much of a headache. Well, plus also, I think they don't want this to be a traumatic experience. It's supposed to be a gift. This donation of your whole body is supposed to be a gift, it's not supposed to put your

next of kin through hell. No, and they don't want a headache, let's be honest. Once you die, you are not guaranteed even if you want to donate your body that you can have your body donated. No. It's a decent shape. There's a lot of disease and things that they won't accept, HIV one or two, AIDS, related deaths, B or C, syphilis, kidney failure, jaundice, viral infections, bacterial infections,

extensive trauma. Yeah, you can't be severely burned. They want you to be basically a typical human being. Yeah, you can't be too overweight. No, that's a big one. Some places will only accept people up to 170, 180, 190 pounds for practical reasons. Yeah, embalming adds about 100 pounds to you and they're going to have to move you around if you're in an anatomy lab for a year.

Some attendants are going to have to move you on and off gurneys and in and out of the freezer for a whole year and they don't want to deal with a 400 pound cadaver when they can deal with 250 pound cadavers. Yeah, they also want to be able to find your organs very easily and not have to wade through lots of tissue. Yes. You know what I'm saying? Yep.

So if you want to, if you're very serious about donating your body after death, you want to, that's a good reason to take care of yourself while you're alive. Also you can help this much less, but if you're emaciated, grossly emaciated, you probably are not going to have your body accepted. This brings up a really important point. If your body is going to be rejected, which it very easily can be, you need to have a plan in place for the disposition of your body should it come back to your family or more likely they're not going to ship it and the place isn't going to just send it back,

but they're going to call the place and the place is going to be like, we can't use your relative. And now you are, your family's stuck with your dead body, which is not a situation you want to put your family in. Yeah. I would, God, I would hope that most people would think like, if this doesn't happen, then we can just cremate and they wouldn't be like, what do we do now? You know, it's not like a sitcom.

Yeah. Well, you can listen to our podcast, Things to Do with the Dead Body. Right. Oh, I'm glad you bring that up because the Mayo Clinic uses alcohol. What is it? Alkaline hydrolysis? Oh, really? The one that turns you into goo.

Oh, nice. That's how they get rid of bodies. Well, one positive thing, actually, let's take another break here and we'll talk a little bit more about pros and cons of doing this right after this. Hey friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the

backyard guest house over childhood home. Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. Just about everything you want to do in life depends on what you know. To earn more, learn more at Houston Community College. 8CC has more than 300 programs. You can take courses at transfer to a major university, or you can jump into an exciting

career field in just two years or less. 8CC has cutting edge programs like artificial intelligence and robotics, process technology, cybersecurity, solar technology, business, health sciences, and more. Spring classes are registering now, so frame your future. Visit 8CCS.edu. So Chuck, there were a couple more things, like you were talking about the steps to donating your body, right? And they might not take you.

If they do take you, it depends on what organization or company that you go with, right? One of the great things about a for-profit company is your family, if you're accepted and you probably will be accepted, they usually have the, not the lowest standards, but the most leeway in accepting bodies. Well, yeah, you can, with the free market, you can shop around, see who you feel most comfortable with. They are also the ones who are the least likely to put any costs on to your family, right? So they will pay for things like transportation, they will pay for cremation, they will probably

pay for the cost to return the cremated remains of you to your family. Yeah, because when they use your body, there eventually will be a cadaver there that is of no use to them and they will cremate that and send you the remains. Right. And they are also usually pretty quick with it because with a lot of the for-profit companies, they basically cut you into the various parts and then ship those out. And then they have, they do this fairly quickly and they take that leftover stuff and then bring your remains back to your family within a couple of weeks with, if you donate your

body to say like a medical school, the medical school is going to be like, thank you. This is very nice. We need you to pay for some stuff. So transporting the body, which is why a lot of people will donate to their local medical school. Yeah, like Emory. Yeah. So if you live in Atlanta and you donate your body to Emory, Emory will probably pay

to come pick it up. But if you died in Alabama and you had plans to donate your body to Emory, your family might want to find a place in Alabama because Emory is going to accept your body, but they are not going to pay to get it to Atlanta. Right. I don't think they have medical schools in Alabama. Sorry, Alabama. So mean.

And like, we're in Georgia, it's like, right, you know, yeah, we're just so high on the hog. I know, but Georgians are always like, well, we're not Mississippi and Alabama. Not funny. Not fair. It's a little funny. I like Alabama. So that is, that is definitely a pro of a for-profit company.

Yeah. Like the costs associated with this donation are low to non-existent. That's right. So wherever your body goes, there's going to be some lots of paperwork to fill out. Your family's going to see your body off at the funeral home, maybe. The funeral home is going to, hopefully, is going to put it, put your body into a casket. It's going to get on an airplane or it's going to go down the road to Emory or whatever. And then you will have no say whatsoever in what happens to it after that point.

Is that always true? Pretty much, yes. I figured there were some companies that allowed you some control. I don't think so. I think that there are, I have heard that you can opt to not be used for cosmetic surgery, but I didn't see that anywhere in research. Interesting. One thing that some organizations allow you to do is to also be an organ donor, but generally

they want your whole body with all its organs intact. But some will allow, again, because it's not one single body, no pun intended, some will allow you to donate your organs, some organs first. And I only saw one that does that, which I thought was great. I didn't realize that you could do that. But the reason why they want all of your organs intact is because you're serving as a teaching tool for medical students who need to cut into these things. Because you donate it to a medical school.

So that was another thing too. If you donate it to, say, like a medical school, you'll get your cremated remains back usually as well, but it'll be well over a year because they're going to use you for that year of medical school. Yeah. And you're going to want to get right and your family get right with your ceremonies and how that's handled because you either won't have your cremains or it might take a little while.

So just wrap your head around the fact that you're just going to have a memorial service for your loved one that may not include remains. And some people still don't like that idea of like, they want a body there. Some people still need that closure of seeing the dead body sounds awful. The problem is that that is not going to happen if you donate your body. Because you can't be donated embalmed. So you are shipped fresh, freshly dead. Yeah.

That's happened within a couple of days. Yeah. Very quickly. And in fact, grave robbers, when that was at its height, people at some point in some graveyard, their family would guard the body for three or four days until they figured it was too late. Right. Yeah.

I think I remember hearing that, man. Crazy, huh? It really is. So the point is the first step to all this is to tell your family and then get it down on paper, either in an advanced directive or will something like that and then start looking around. Yeah. And since a lot of these organizations will pay for the cremains and all that, like hopefully

financial, it's not a purely financial consideration, but you can save a lot of money. Money by donating your body to science because funerals and stuff like that is really expensive. That's right, Chuck. And actually, that is, there's a post on getrichslowly.com about donating your body to science to save money. Really? Yeah. Nice.

And I mean, it's a totally legitimate thing. The thing is, is you want to have a backup just in case your body is not accepted. You don't want to bet on the idea that you don't have to save anything for funeral costs because you're donating your body to science. Right. But yeah, I mean, like funerals cost several thousand dollars, apparently, according to this article, it was about a little under 8,500 bucks in 2012. That's the average.

Yeah. And then cremation is 1,500 and up to six grand for a cremation with funeral service and all the bells and whistles, unless you bring your own coffee can and save money that way. Big Lubowski reference. Very nice. You can save all this money, especially if you go with a for-profit company and just give it to your heirs instead.

Yeah. Yeah. What else? Well, there are some, I think we talked about the cons, right? Yeah. Maybe they have a section in here about creative ways to donate your body. There are other things you can do. Yeah.

You can donate your body to be used as a crash test dummy. Well, here's the thing. I don't think you really necessarily have say over that. Like I think when you donate your body, you're donating it to potentially all this stuff in the U.S. I think you can donate it. Maybe I'm wrong. I didn't look it up.

I thought you could donate it directly to the NHTSA. I don't know. Maybe so. Or you could move to Michigan and make it that much more likely that it'll be used by them. That's a good point. But they do use bodies of crash test dummies. Yeah, they still do.

It was a great, there was a Wired article that was really good and then I saw another one called The Driving Dead, human cadavers still used in car crash testing. Yeah. There's a place called the Laboratory of Technology and Systems for Safety in Automobiles. Is that at Wayne State? Tessa. No, it's in Spain. Okay.

In Northern Spain and it's one of six places in the world where they still use human body crash tests, cadavers for crash tests. Yeah. And it's been happening for a long time and the car companies have distanced themselves from it. They don't directly do it, but what they do is they get the data from these places that do it. Right.

Because they don't want to be directly tied to it. No. But Ford very famously in 2011, I guess, was testing an inflatable rear seat belt. So I guess they said, here's our rear seat belt. Why don't you see what happened with cadavers? In the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says, oh, we know what you mean. And so they get their hands on some cadavers and they wrap them up in body stockings and cover their faces.

Did you see the pictures of that? And they run them through the rigors and then do autopsies afterwards to see what happened to the body after it was in this crash. Well, and there's lots of advantages, obviously. Even though biomechanics and crash test dummies now are way better than they used to be. Nothing beats a body. Nothing beats a body. You can't tell what's really going to happen to your internal organs.

It's also imperfect because there are no two cadavers that are the same. So it's not going to be consistent. Also cadavers are usually older and more fragile. And also, young cadavers are hard to come by because the highest rate of death among young people are car crashes. Wow, how ironic. So, yeah, a strange twist there. Yeah.

Stuff to get young cadavers for that research. Wow. There's a guy in the 1930s named Lawrence Patrick from Wayne State University. I think you were talking about him. And he was somewhat of a, he was the guy, the crash test pilot. Stap? Yeah, Colonel Stap. He was sort of like him.

He was his own test dummy and would just, you know, throw himself down stairs and do all sorts of stuff. And he even flung a cadaver down a university elevator shaft to test the strength of a human skull at one point. And found like, oh, it can hold up. Yeah, pretty good. So he was, I think, led the charge at Wayne State and they still do work there with cadavers and highway safety, don't they?

It's, well, yeah. And it's so funny to me that this is like scandalous. Really some leak at GM started like talking to the media about how Saab was running tests using dead bodies. It's like, that's a great use of a dead body to like save other people's lives. There's this article from a guy at Wayne State who wrote in 1995 that cadavers save about 8,500 lives annually. Thanks to serving as crash test dummies.

NASA actually used some as well to test the Orion capsule because it just isn't the same thing as using a robot or something like that. And they certainly don't want to put humans in there first. No. Live humans at least. That's the next step. So they use cadavers. I don't understand why this is at all scandalous.

Again, I think donating your body is a fantastic thing to do. I think it could get scandalous in that, which was what we're about to talk about here with the bodies exhibits is how these cadavers are sourced. Oh, wow. That's where it gets scandalous. Lay it on me, buddy. Well, that was one of the other creative things you can do. If you want to donate your body to be in one of those body exhibits, there are two main

ones that I saw. Body worlds and bodies. The exhibit. The exhibit. I can't remember which one. The exhibition. Sorry. I think you mean I saw that one.

That's one in Atlanta. It's based out of Atlanta, actually. It's astounding. It is astounding, but they have been dogged by criticism because one group says that straight up, I think bodies, the exhibition straight up says these are probably criminals from China and we're going to be straight up and say they're unclaimed bodies. The other one is body worlds and that's been in the US since 2004 and apparently they have death certificates, but the paper trail cuts off at a certain point and they say it's with

respect to anonymity, but certain people have called them out and said, you know what? You should have a paper trail. You can't unequivocally say that these cadavers are all on the up and up, can they? They say they can, but they've come under a lot of fire and those exhibits have in general because of where they get these bodies from. Well, now I feel dirty for having seen that. Yeah? Yeah, I mean like it's disrespectful to the dead.

Well in 2008 in New York, the Attorney General forced premier, which was the company behind Think Body Worlds to put a disclaimer that said this exhibit displays human remains of Chinese citizens or residents which were originally received by the Chinese Bureau of Police. The Chinese Bureau of Police may receive bodies from Chinese prisons. There cannot independently verify that the human remains you're viewing are not those persons who are incarcerated in Chinese prisons. Yeah, so they forced them to put that up at least. Pretty out there.

They're putting it out there. They probably have that sign after you pay your money to go in. That is so nuts. I doubt if it's by right beside the ticket booth, but apparently you can donate your body although I don't know that you can because it sounds like they're not sourcing from, you know, donating from the United States. Yeah, I saw somewhere that they have a list of like 12,000 living donors just waiting to donate their bodies.

Really? Yeah, who knows what's real or true anymore. Who knows? The other thing you can do is what we talked about in our awesome classic episode on body farms. If you want to help out forensic study, you can donate your body to the University of Tennessee Go Vols and you can be thrown out in the woods to decompose. That's right.

Did you say Go Vols really? I have to keep it consistent. That's cool, man. Yeah, the body farm episode was great. I think the only thing I can't say is go G-A-T-O-R-S. Which is funny because you can't even say those two words together. Yeah, yeah, I don't blame you. But my family's from Tennessee so I can root for most SEC teams except for the one in Florida.

It doesn't, none of it matters anyway. Did you hear about the woman in New York whose body was accidentally donated for medical science? No. And her family was like, what'd you do with grandma? And the New York medical examiner went, oh. I said, we planted a tree in her honor, which apparently is what some medical schools will do.

They said, here's some money. We're really sorry. That was apparently very traumatic for the family. I imagine. They said that, yeah. Yeah. See, I'm not precious about after I'm dead. I'm not precious about this lump of cells and skin that remains.

To me, that means nothing to me. I'm totally with you, man. I totally agree. To me, the only thing is somebody profiting off of a donation by anybody else. No matter what it is, whether it's a body part or money, whatever, that's wrong. Yeah, respect my spirit and who I was, not this dead carcass on the table. That's not me anymore, you know? That's right.

I'm gone, buddy. I'm up there with the highwaymen. Oh, yeah? Yeah. I'm flying a starship. Man. What else you got? A skeleton.

The University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, I didn't look up their mascot, but you said none of it matters anyway, so. I think they're the Lobos. Lobos? I think so. They have a skeleton collection, even though they aren't on display. No, and apparently the body farm in Tennessee, and that's, we should say, not the only body farm there's several, but the one in Tennessee will put you in their skeleton collection

afterward as well. Nice. You can be very useful there. Maybe I would like to be. There's a skeleton here at the House of Works offices. I'd like to be put alongside him. Did you ever hear about the skeleton of the outlaw? I don't remember his name, but he was like a real live, one of the last Wild West outlaws

in the early 20th century, and his body was put on display by the coroner, and he charged people in Nickel to come look, and from that, he ended up never being buried, and he ended up in one of those House of Horrors, that one of the rides, Spook Ride or whatever they call them, Dark Rides. Oh, I've definitely heard about that. It turned out that somebody was cleaning him or something once, decades later, and broke his hand off and realized that's a bone in there. It's real.

It's a wax dummy, and they figured out, somebody figured out who it was, that it was this old criminal who was never buried and ended up in a real carnival ride. Yeah, I remember hearing about that. That's crazy. Yep. You got anything else? I got nothing else. You could be turned into collagen to be used for facelifts.

See? I don't want to chase anybody away from this. I just think like, I want everybody to flood the market with donated bodies, so much so that the price comes down, and anybody who's in it to like, who's a body pirate gets out of the business because it's not lucrative anymore. Yeah. Bam. Since Chuck doesn't have anything more, and I don't either, if you want to learn more

about donating your body to science, a very virtuous thing to do, you can type those words in the search bar at HouseTofWorks.com, and since I said virtuous, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this Underwater Towns. Hey guys, and you mentioned of an underwater town near you, and you caught my attention in how droughts work, originally from the Catskills in New York, where my family lived for a few generations, and I still live there in the summer. The Roundout Reservoir, it's always fascinating to me because when you drive around it, it

takes a little time, and you pass signs that read, former site of Eureka, former site of Montella, former site of Lackawack. Before World War II, with the huge influx of GIs into New York City and Long Island, more water was needed, and the three towns were condemned and flooded to create the reservoir. A few years ago, my grandfather passed away and I became interested in creating a family archive. One of the many interesting things among my grandparents' photos, papers, and other items is the postcard that I sent to you.

Picture that is. It's not signed, but according to my grandma, it was written by the postal employee of the town in the last days of Eureka. It mentions on the back that he's sending it in part because he thinks of my great-grandfather Bruce might want a photo of the mill that his father built. The Roundout is a water supply for New York City, so I wouldn't expect any gulf globes to start breaking the surface if the water got low, but who knows. I have no idea who's down there.

Pretty interesting story. Here's the postcard. I also think it's interesting that time, apparently, only a name in town was required to send a postcard, and that is from Patrick. Thanks, Patrick. It was pretty neat, and I just think underwater towns are, it's kind of sad and kind of cool all at the same time. And creepy.

As long as you get people out of there. Oh, yeah. Well, the town. Especially they warn the residents first. I know, but you know how people are. They don't want to leave their homes. Oh, well, whatever they were warned. There you have it.

If you want to get in touch with Chuck or me or whoever, you can tweet to SYSKpodcast. You can join us on facebook.com. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com, and as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Just about everything you want to do in life depends on what you know. To earn more, learn more at Houston Community College. HCC has more than 300 programs.

You can take courses that transfer to a major university, or you can jump into an exciting career field in just two years or less. HCC has cutting-edge programs like artificial intelligence and robotics, process technology, cybersecurity, solar technology, business, health sciences, and more. Spring classes are registering now, so frame your future at hccs.edu. I'm Munga Shatigler, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House.

But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me, and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes, because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.