http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i10/10a05601.htm
From the issue dated October 27, 2006
NOTES FROM ACADEME
The Truths That Bodies Yield
By PETER MONAGHAN
Knoxville, Tenn.
This may be slender consolation: If you were, say, stuck 17 times with a shiv and then concealed in a shallow grave in the woods, your demise might be reconstructed, and your killer brought to justice, thanks to rather ghoulish research here at the University of Tennessee.
Twenty-five years ago, on an acre of scrappy terrain behind a large parking lot of the University of Tennessee Medical Center, across the Tennessee River from the university's campus, William M. Bass III created the world's only facility for the study of rotting human bodies.
Here, secured by wooden and cyclone fences, are 170 bodies, buried or strewn about in imitation of how they would lie after deaths gone unnoticed or deaths by foul play. The stench is gag inducing from 30 yards, and as overwhelming as pepper spray from 10.
Mr. Bass and his colleagues at the Forensic Anthropology Center use the corpses to study what happens to human bodies as they decompose, and what that can tell investigators. In many cases, the researchers wound the bodies as criminals would, or leave them in car trunks, or in shallow graves, up hillsides or down hollows.
The mystery novelist Patricia Cornwell wrote a best-selling book set at the enclosure, and its title, The Body Farm, has been attached to the facility ever since. Television series like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation long ago discovered the center, too, if only to glitz up and distort the real, and messy, research performed there.
It is decidedly unglamorous. "I collect samples every couple of days from beneath three bodies on sand and three on soil," says Rachel Parkinson, a biochemistry doctoral candidate from Victoria University, in New Zealand, stooped over a body in the enclosure. Sounds easy enough, but as she rolls aside the corpse to scoop a soil sample from beneath it, a right leg and toes, greyed but still intact, flop from beneath the black tarpaulin that is draped over the body, and fluids ooze out.
"The sand simulates surfaces like carpeting," explains the student's supervisor, Arpad A. Vass, a research professor at nearby Oak Ridge National Laboratory who has a joint appointment here. Sand is less biologically active than the soil.
Several of the university's researchers use the center, which is also frequently visited by chemists, coroners, forensic anthropologists, homicide investigators, and odontologists. All are trying to better identify the dead, gauge the time since death, and analyze foul play.
In 1981, when Mr. Bass decided to set up the facility, he had already been a forensic anthropologist for longer than the term had existed. By looking at what dead bodies could tell anthropologists, he had revolutionized the field. As a next step, he set about securing a supply of cadavers from medical examiners, law-enforcement agencies, and arson investigators, as well as through donations from families.
By now, many of the typical processes in human decomposition are well understood, but researchers want to know much more. In one study, Mr. Vass has inserted pipes into simulated shallow, clandestine graves, to determine which odors migrate out of the soil. He hopes that one day dogs might be trained to detect those smells more certainly, or that robots might do the job. "Some bodies have been buried for 16 years and still are emitting odors," he says.
In other studies, bodies have been concealed under concrete slabs to help improve methods of detecting corpses by ground-penetrating radars or heat-detecting systems.
Says Richard L. Jantz, a longtime colleague of Mr. Bass's who now directs the center: "There's no dearth of interesting studies; there is a dearth of money."
Mr. Bass is an irrepressible presence on the campus and in American forensic anthropology as a whole. He lectures constantly to police departments. He testifies in court cases. He and Jon Jefferson, working together under the pseudonym Jefferson Bass, released the first of their Body Farm detective novels, Carved in Bone (William Morrow), last year, and it became a New York Times best seller. Their follow-up, Flesh and Bone, will appear in January. In 2003 they issued Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab, the Body Farm, Where the Dead Do Tell Tales (Putnam). The authors' Web site (http://www .jeffersonbass.com) includes a short video tour of the Body Farm.
It's no surprise, then, that you learn some odd things about mortality when you stand among the rotting bodies with Mr. Bass and his colleagues.
About telltale signs, for example. Just as a hanging victim exhibits purple coloration and a swollen tongue, says Mr. Bass, the skull of someone who has been shot in the head is likely to explode if it catches fire, into pieces as small as a quarter.
Then there are the maggots. Thanks to them, corpses are often reduced to bare-boned skeletons within 14 days. "In July around here, you don't even have to be dead," says Mr. Jantz.
"That's right," says Mr. Bass. "I've taken bodies off the truck and seen flies on them within 15 seconds."
"Oh, flies are waiting on the hood for them," says Mr. Vass.
Fly maggots eat the subcutaneous fat first, and then get down to serious work, the three researchers say.
So, Mr. Bass tells the law-enforcement trainees who come here regularly for instruction, look for maggot masses because that is where the wounds will be.
If you would like to take part in the work here, Mr. Jantz and his colleagues have a deal for you: Will them your body, and you can stick around.
They can use you for their forensics research, and when you are but bones, they can put you in the 700-specimen William M. Bass Donated and Forensic Skeletal Collection, which is by far the largest collection of modern skeletons in the country.
Many of the bodies left in the outdoor enclosure are covered in black tarps to encourage the activity of maggots, which don't like sunlight. That quickens the pace at which skeletons can be taken away for final cleaning in a plant near the anthropology department's offices. In the old days, Mr. Bass completed the task himself, at home. In his kitchen.
Lee Meadows Jantz, a former student of Mr. Bass and now wife of Mr. Jantz, is in charge of procuring bodies. Most come from medical examiners, who are empowered to dispose of corpses that are unclaimed or unidentifiable — drifters, prostitutes — or from families of deceased persons — often, family members who have no interest in burying perhaps long-estranged relatives.
Only a small percentage of bodies come here from people who will themselves to the program. But now, with a waiting list of 900, that will change. "Richard and I are both in that file," says Ms. Jantz.
Skeletal specimens are put into large cardboard file boxes, whose contents are painstakingly detailed: date of acquisition, age, ancestry, sex. What about the number and condition of teeth? Does the skeleton contain orthopedic devices such as artificial joints? Does it exhibit deformities?
The causes of death, where known, are recorded, constituting a litany of demise: alcohol abuse, aneurysm, cancer, blunt-force trauma, gunshot wound, suicide by pipe bomb. ...
A few newborn and stillborn infants and fetuses have been given to the collection. Mr. Jantz opens one box to display the pieces of a preemie's skull, as delicate and thin as a robin's egg and with the texture of meshed coral.
The collection presents a picture of the modern skeleton, permitting scientists to observe the effects of modern diseases and ways of life. Skeletons have thinned and lengthened over the last 100 to 150 years, for example, as people have carried lesser physical loads. "Life has become vastly different, and the skeleton reflects that," says Mr. Jantz.
At the Body Farm, as at the skeleton collection, space is at a premium. The university is considering providing the center with 15 more acres, pending some logistics. For example, the new space will need to have no close neighbors. Occasionally, when Mr. Bass visits the UT medical center, he gets a cheery greeting from a senior hospital official who owns a fancy condominium on a bluff high above the river, a good mile from the Body Farm as the vulture flies: "Smelled you this morning!"
The university has accommodated the facility for the sake of research, but now it has an added impetus: The Body Farm draws students to the anthropology department like, well, flies.
Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
