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Corpsegate
Tulane: I'm glad to see that the story about Army testing of cadavers from 'Donated Bodies' programs is starting to pick up steam. When I wrote about it on Wednesday, it had only been in the business section of one paper. This whole mess reminds me of George Romero's 'Day of the Dead'. For those of you unfamiliar with this film, it is the third of the Living Dead trilogy, where zombies have quite literally taken over the earth, and the few remaining humans live in underground military bunkers. In spite of their predicament, the soldiers keep plenty of zombies on hand to 'experiment on'.
The bodies that the army most recently blew up came from the Tulane University body donor program, and were supplied by the National Anatomical Service. (No web site available). They were used to test combat boots. Chuck Dasey is a spokesman for the US Army Medical Research and Material Command, and explains the experiments thusly:
"You cause the cadaver to be near an explosion that is intended to mimic a landmine explosion on a battlefield or in a minefield. The purpose of the project was to evaluate available footwear to see if their use would reduce the severity of injury."
It seems that the Army has long been involved in testing explosives and firearms on cadavers. The earliest I could find come from the 1904 testing of .45 mm firearms. Some sample text.
During the cadaver testing, the bodies were hung by the head and were shot at from distances of 3 yards, 37.5 yards and 75 yards. The target areas were fleshy areas, bone ends and bone shafts. If a round struck a fleshy area, only the hollow point rounds produced a bare minimum of sway, but if a bone end was struck, all the rounds showed similar results, though the .455 Man-Stopper and the .476 Eley were just slightly better.
It's interesting to note how little military writing has changed in the last 100 years. And how little sensibilities have changed as well.
It is also interesting to note that the military does indeed have a program whereby veterans may donate their bodies for this type of weapons research. Problem is, even the most macho of veterans are a little bit squeamish about having their bodies treated in this manner, so the program is a limited success at best. This is where the medical schools come in. They tend to have an overabundance of bodies, and as we can see from the UCLA scandal, a willful ignorance.
The Staten Island Advance is first out of the gate with statements from John Vincent Scalia (first mentioned in connection with corpsebrokering in the current Harper's), a funeral director who's side business just happens to be the National Anatomical Service.
Scalia said he assumed that like most of his other 40 to 50 clients -- all of which are medical schools that loan each other extra corpses they've amassed through donor programs -- the corpses would be used for a "basic anatomy program."
Of the bodies' grisly fate, Scalia said, "I wouldn't have even considered shipping it to them if I knew that ahead of time." He said he will not work with University of Virginia again.
Well, take that for whit it's worth, but it was Tulane to UVA to Fort Detrick, Maryland, and it was Scalia's outfit that was doing the packing and the cleanup, so that ignorance didn't last long. <ed note: at of this moment, the final destination of the bodies differs from account to account> We get a final quote for this update from the New York Times.
Mr. Scalia said he was frustrated that his business was now being mentioned in the same breath as the U.C.L.A. doctor charged with illegally selling body parts. But he said he understood why it was happening. "Anything that has to do with a cadaver is sensational," he said. "It's all being lumped together."
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Meanwhile, At UCLA: In what can only be called unremarkable news, the AP is reporting the motive behind Henry 'Handyman' Reid's corpsebrokering: money. Seems like he owed 100K to the IRS and was working on his third bankruptcy in six years at the time he was hired by UCLA to head their 'Body Donor' program. Note to administrators: these are called warning signs.
Elsewhere, we find out that Reid was a liar, although that doesn't seem like all that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. It seems that in a 2002 court hearing on the status of the Willed Body program, he claimed to have degrees in philosophy and music, when indeed he did not. The relevance of this escapes me... | 
