Donate your body to science?

Ever consider donating your body to science? Your sad little meat suit could advance the cause of human knowledge! Sure, maybe you were a "callow reprobate" in life (the judge's words, not ours), but in death you serve a higher function. Well, unless science decides to use your carcass for one of these things ...

#5. Scientists Tested The Punching Proficiency Of Severed Arms…

David Carrier, a biology professor at the University of Utah -- who doesn't completely buy into the whole "civilized dexterity" thing. He poses another theory: Our hands evolved as they did so that we could more effectively punch each other in the face.

So he gathered up some dismembered arms and started figuring out how to make them deliver haymakers. ..

Researchers attached the arms to a pendulum and tied fishing line to the tendons of the forearm muscles, allowing them to be controlled by guitar tuners like marionettes straight out of a Hellraiser puppet show.

Carrier and Co. then forced the severed arms to slug a force-measuring dumbbell using three hand positions: a clenched fist, a loose fist, and an open-palm slap…

#4. The Military Shot Corpses To Test The Stopping Power Of Handguns…

In 1899, LaGarde and Colonel John T. Thompson (who would later go on to invent the Thompson submachine gun made famous by Al Capone and the like), hung an unspecified number of cadavers from the ceiling and took turns shooting them with .38 and .45 caliber revolvers. Dozens of rounds were fired into each corpse and, based entirely on how much each shot made the body swing, LaGarde and Thompson "calculated" the relative stopping power of the various gun models. Their findings influenced military policies, specifically those dictating that service pistols should be of no less than .45 caliber….

#3. Plastic Surgeons Practice Their Craft On Decapitated Heads…

Countless courses allow surgeons to practice procedures like nose jobs on honest-to-goodness decapitated heads. Why decapitated? Because the rest of the body can be put to better use elsewhere …, and the scientific community is anything but wasteful. Horrific, disturbing, nightmare-inducing -- never wasteful, though…

#2. Scientists Made Corpses Blink (And Now You Never Will Again)…

By screwing one end of a sling into the bone at the corner of the eye and fastening the other end to a pacemaker-like contraption hidden in the natural hollow of the temple, the paralyzed (but now bionic!) eyelid can be made to blink in tandem with the other, healthy eye. That is, if the patient is still alive. When testing the system on a cadaver, the result is one working eyelid and the heavy psychological trauma of having just been hit on by a zombie.

#1. Nearly Everything Around You Has Been Tested On Cadavers

How do you think researchers determine how safe you'll be during a crash? Crash test dummies, right? Even the most technologically advanced dummy can tell you only so much. To get the truest possible picture, sometimes you've got to smash some poor, dead bastard into a brick wall.

Though, officially speaking, car manufacturers will deny it to hell and back, cadaver testing is still alive and well. Because the best way to see how well a new safety feature will protect the human body is to destroy a few human bodies.

http://www.cracked.com/article_23700_did-you-donate-your-body-to-science-maybe-dont-read-this..html