Death is inevitable and often unpredictable. But you still have control about what happens to your body after dying.
That’s if you proactively chose–before being dead–to donate your body or parts of your body to research study. The Health Resources & Services Administration lists eight vital organs that can be donated: heart, kidneys (two of them), pancreas, lungs (also two of them), liver, intestines, hands (two again), and face. You can also donate tissue–like your heart valves or corneas–or your blood or stem cells.
But approximately 20,000 people in the United States choose to donate their entire body to science each year. In that case, what happens to a donor’s body after they die?
The steps of body donation
The first step for donation is passing the strict requirements many donation services put in place. Unlike donating individual organs or tissues, a donor’s age isn’t a big factor, says Pamela White, Head of Anatomy and Head of the Body Donation Programme at Newcastle University in England. But how a donor dies might alter their chances of being accepted. “People sign up when they may be in their forties, we don’t know what they’re going to develop by the time they get to their seventies or eighties,” says White. Infectious or respiratory diseases that may spread from a donor’s body are disqualifying factors, she adds. Many institutions have weight limits for donors’ bodies–donors are often capped at 180-200 pounds or based on BMI, a controversial and debunked method of analyzing a person’s health.
But if a donor does make the cut, their body will be collected by a funeral director linked to your recipient organization. White’s colleague Isobel Duckling, Newcastle’s Technical Team Leader for Anatomy and Clinical Skills, says that within the next 24 hours, a team of technicians will embalm the body by infusing an embalming solution containing formaldehyde into a major artery, which pushes out the body’s blood via a tube connected to a major vein. The team will transfuse two-and-a-half to four gallons of embalming fluid through the body. At Newcastle, Duckling’s team then puts the donor in cold storage for between six and eight weeks. Then, it’s the donor’s time to shine–the university will use their body for research studies or medical education.
An important consideration here, says Duckling, is that at Newcastle donors have the agency to decide how their body will be used when they initially apply. Some donors might be used to trial new surgical techniques. Others may be used in drug testing, or to study the science of decomposition. Some donors might be used as crash test dummies in automobile safety testing. Some donors, she adds, opt out of research studies and their bodies go straight into medical education. Medical students dissect bodies, gaining invaluable hands-on experience in the internal variation between patients’ bodies.
At Newcastle, donors can also choose how long researchers can study their bodies. Some opt to let the medical school keep their body indefinitely. Others ask that the school return their body to their family after a set period. “We then arrange for that donor to be cremated, and the family contacted, and then the family can attend the funeral service,” says Duckling.
Newcastle carefully looks after donors while medical students study them. At least two staff members must be present in the room with the donor’s body or tissue, and access to the body storage rooms is tightly monitored and restricted.
Choose your donation service carefully
Potential donors must remember that Newcastle’s setup is not standard and that body donation services’ rules vary significantly. Most non-profit body donation programs in the United States are affiliated with universities. You can see a list of programs by state here. Other services are for-profit. As time and speedy transport are paramount when handling donors, these services are usually tied to geographical location. If you register with the University of California’s body donation program and then move to another state, the program asks you to delist and register with a local program.
A recent survey of 72 body-donation programs across the United States found that most programs did not allow donors to decide how long their bodies would be stored. They also provided limited scope for patients to opt out of certain types of research. This policy came under scrutiny when rogue for-profit “body brokers” sent donors to the Department of Defense, where researchers shot them or blew them up as part of ballistics or munitions testing. This, understandably, did not go down well with the donors’ families.
Even among non-profit donation services in the US, standardized regulation is minimal, meaning individual providers set guidelines. Donors who want to ensure their bodies are used in testing that advances medical research or helps educate physicians must choose their donation service carefully. Duckling says that motivations are more practical for some donors. “What we’ve found recently is due to the cost of the funeral, we’re getting more people wanting to donate their body,” she explains.
White emphasizes that donating one’s body to science is hugely charitable regardless of a donor’s intent. “In their tenure with us–we keep them for a minimum of three years–they are going to be working very hard, and they will be teaching over 3,000 healthcare professionals. That is everybody from pharmacy students, medical students, speech and language therapists, dentists,” she says.
“The profound impact of our donors’ generosity will live on through knowledge that will benefit future generations,” says White. “Through their selfless gift, many others will live.”
This story is part of Popular Science’s Ask Us Anything series, where we answer your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the ordinary to the off-the-wall. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.
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