Man who donated his mother's body discovers it was sold on to the US Military, strapped to a chair and blown up in 'blast test'

WHOOOPEE!!

Urban legend

R2 no, it seems to have happened.

Yeah, something is off. Only early onset Alzheimer's is genetically passed, and at age 73 she didn't have early onset. While there are genes that give you an increased chance at getting late onset, having or not having the gene doesn't mean you will or won't get the disease.

They shouldn't have sold the body for those kinds of tests if they were not part of the agreement.

However, what the story did not make clear is whether the tests that were conducted were scientifically valid, though gross, tests. The article seems to suggest that the people conducting the research depended on the facility from which they were buying the bodies for consent from donors. I wonder whether they actually knew and merely have plausible deniability.

If that type of testing that looks at various impact scenarios can be used to create safer vehicles and countermeasures to improve the safety of living occupants, some good did come of it, as lurid as the details are. Interestingly, the line I draw is that she was already dead. Unlike the gruesome tests that were conducted on prisoners during WWII, the data from which is usually not used by reputable scientists, this does not trade on the suffering of a living person.

It's wrong and the details of the goings-on at the facility are even sicker.

She blowed up real good.

Damn it R6 you beat me to it!

Well, she was useful to someone in the end. Isn't that what he wanted?

I know it’s wrong, but I am laughing SO HARD right now!

Blow Mama from the Train...then the Car...

God, he's such an Indian giver

[quote]They shouldn't have sold the body for those kinds of tests if they were not part of the agreement.

You mean the company, I assume? The owner is being sued now, and was already found guilty of operating an illegal business a few years back. Didn't get any jail time though, for whatever reason.

You asked if these were valid tests, but you apparently missed that the owner had containers full of severed penises and sewed heads onto different bodies for fun, so the tests done by this company were obviously not valid. The military tests probably were valid in a military sense, but they didn't get the paperwork proving permission had been given, yet they used the bodies anyway.

At least he got a ✋ out of it

Do not donate your body to science or your organs when you are dead

Why not?

Don't some universities accept body donations directly?

At least her funeral was a blast.

What color were the Mom's eyes?

Blue.

One blew this way, one blew that way.

Nothing compared to what they do to living goats.

I believe this is also the place where the FBI found multiple bodies/parts, including the head of a woman sewn to the body of a man, then displayed on hung on a wall (?!)

Yeah, the Biological Resource Center in AZ isn't doing too well right now...

That sucks for her son.

My grand-mother wants to donate her body too, wonder if it may happen to her.

OMG laughing so hard.

We put our mother in the freezer and it’s worked out very well.

I've been leery of the "donating your body to science" thing ever since my sister, who works for a major multinational, told me about the purchase requisition she handled for a half-dozen human heads to be used in product testing.

People think their bodies are going to be used by medical researchers at best, med school students at worst. But you won't actually know where your body/parts of your body might end up, or what uses might be made of them. You should be aware of and okay with that before you decide to donate your body.

Of course these middleman companies keep all the money

Why must we donate when they can pay for it? I want $1,000,000 for my hand alone.

[quote] Unlike the gruesome tests that were conducted on prisoners during WWII, the data from which is usually not used by reputable scientists, this does not trade on the suffering of a living person.

The US government did use the data from tests carried out by the Japanese on war prisoners.

[quote] MacArthur struck a deal with Japanese informants:[71] he secretly granted immunity to the physicians of Unit 731, including their leader, in exchange for providing America, but not the other wartime allies, with their research on biological warfare and data from human experimentation.[5]

The book Stiff by Mary Roach details many of the experiments that use corpses.

I'm rethinking the donor dot on my driver's license.

Me too r29. I don’t want my body being used by big pharma to make even more $$$. I want it harvested to save lives or to train med students.

I don't understand their formatting, they do multiple bullet points before the article begins just to repeat them all in the body of the text? Is this the new journalism? Is it for lazy readers who don't know how to skim? Is this just a DM thing?

R31 DM articles, especially ones that have more than one article over time, are a hodgepodge of paragraphs cut and pasted and reworded each time so the further you scroll down, the less relevant the information becomes to the actual headline and was likely included in an earlier article talking about some other facts or general information from the main subject.