Nobrainer’s Think Tank

In the last two days I have run across the same article three different times. This is not altogether uncommon. However, the most recent link to the article came from Drudge with the headline “SHOCK: Human corpses used as crash-test dummies…”

I’m not sure that the “SHOCK” is all about. University researches in Austria obtained about 30 corpses from the local medical school. Those bodies were then used in tests to study the body’s reaction to low speed crashes. In fact, these were not crash tests. The bodies were strapped into a seat that was given an initial velocity, around 9 to 10 mph, then stopped to simulate a slow speed crash.

I’ll wager that most humans have gone through similar decelerations without any problems. Football players probably take hits worse than this every day of their lives. This testing seems entirely non-violent.

The researcher involved may be charged for violating the dignity of the dead. But let’s remember that these bodies were apparently donated to medical schools, assumedly for research or instruction. Low speed deceleration testing, I think, fits neatly into the research category.

So I guess it’s really shocking because most who read the headline will assume it happened in the United States. I’m sure they were relieved to find out this was happening in that barbaric Austria. Well think again. The University here definitely uses corpses for testing. I have watched videos of chest compression tests. A corpse is loaded into a testing machine that imparts a sudden, but not catastrophic, compression to the chest. This helps determine the effective spring and damping rates of a human chest for future computer modeling. In fact, some researchers here believe they may have been the first people to observe that the angle the ribs make with the spine increases with age. This effectively explains why it’s more likely for old folks to suffer broken ribs in a crash.

This has been Nobrainer filling in for Paul Harvey, and “that’s the rest of the story.”