unfortunate design decision, the steering wheel shaft of the average automobile was angled and positioned to point straight at the driver's heart.[ 2] In a head-on, you'd be impaled in pretty much the last place you'd want to be impaled. Even when the metal didn't penetrate the chest, the impact alone was often fatal. Despite its thickness, an aorta ruptures relatively easily. This is because every other second, it has a one-pound weight suspended from it: the human heart, filled with blood. Get the weight moving with enough force, as happened in blunt impacts from steering wheels, and even the body's largest blood vessel can't take the strain. If you insist on driving around in vintage cars with no seat belt on, try to time your crashes for the systole—blood-squeezed-out—portion of your heartbeat.
With all this in mind, bioengineers and automobile manufacturers (GM, notably) began ushering cadavers into the driver's seats of crash simulators, front halves of cars on machine-accelerated sleds that are stopped abruptly to mimic the forces of a head-on collision. The goal, one of them anyway, was to design a steering column that would collapse on impact, absorbing enough of the shock to prevent serious injury to the heart and its supporting vessels. (Hoods are now designed to do this too, so that even cars in relatively minor accidents have completely jackknifed hoods, the idea being that the more the car crumples, the less you do.) GM's first collapsible steering wheel shaft, introduced in the early 1960s, cut the risk of death in a head-on collision by half.
And so it went. The collective cadaver résumé boasts contributions to government legislation for lap-shoulder belts, air bags, dashboard padding, and recessed dashboard knobs (autopsy files from the 1950s and 1960s contain more than a few X-ray images of human heads with radio knobs embedded in them). It was not pretty work. In countless seat-belt studies—car manufacturers, seeking to save money, spent years trying to prove that seat belts caused more injuries than they prevented and thus shouldn't be required—bodies were strapped in and crashed, and their innards were then probed for ruptures and manglings. To establish the tolerance limits of the human face, cadavers have been seated with their cheekbones in the firing lines of "rotary strikers."
They've had their lower legs broken by simulated bumpers and their upper legs shattered by smashed-in dashboards.
It is not pretty, but it is most certainly justifiable. Because of changes that have come about as a result of cadaver studies, it's now possible to survive a head-on crash into a wall at 60 mph. In a 1995 Journal of Trauma article entitled "Humanitarian Benefits of Cadaver Research on Injury Prevention," Albert King calculated that vehicle safety improvements that have come about as a result of cadaver research have saved an estimated 8,500 lives each year since 1987. For every cadaver that rode the crash sleds to test three-point seat belts, 61 lives per year have been saved. For every cadaver that took an air bag in the face, 147 people per year survive otherwise fatal head-ons. For every corpse whose head has hammered a windshield, 68 lives per year are saved.
Unfortunately, King did not have these figures handy in 1978, when chairman John Moss of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations called a hearing to investigate the use of human cadavers in car crash testing. Representative Moss said he felt a "personal repugnance about this practice." He said that there had developed within NHTSA "a sort of cult that finds that this is a necessary tool." He believed that there had to be another way to go about it. He wanted proof that dead people in crashing cars behave exactly like living ones—proof that, as exasperated researchers pointed out, could never be obtained because it would mean subjecting a series of live humans to exactly the same high-force impacts as a series of dead
With all this in mind, bioengineers and automobile manufacturers (GM, notably) began ushering cadavers into the driver's seats of crash simulators, front halves of cars on machine-accelerated sleds that are stopped abruptly to mimic the forces of a head-on collision. The goal, one of them anyway, was to design a steering column that would collapse on impact, absorbing enough of the shock to prevent serious injury to the heart and its supporting vessels. (Hoods are now designed to do this too, so that even cars in relatively minor accidents have completely jackknifed hoods, the idea being that the more the car crumples, the less you do.) GM's first collapsible steering wheel shaft, introduced in the early 1960s, cut the risk of death in a head-on collision by half.
And so it went. The collective cadaver résumé boasts contributions to government legislation for lap-shoulder belts, air bags, dashboard padding, and recessed dashboard knobs (autopsy files from the 1950s and 1960s contain more than a few X-ray images of human heads with radio knobs embedded in them). It was not pretty work. In countless seat-belt studies—car manufacturers, seeking to save money, spent years trying to prove that seat belts caused more injuries than they prevented and thus shouldn't be required—bodies were strapped in and crashed, and their innards were then probed for ruptures and manglings. To establish the tolerance limits of the human face, cadavers have been seated with their cheekbones in the firing lines of "rotary strikers."
They've had their lower legs broken by simulated bumpers and their upper legs shattered by smashed-in dashboards.
It is not pretty, but it is most certainly justifiable. Because of changes that have come about as a result of cadaver studies, it's now possible to survive a head-on crash into a wall at 60 mph. In a 1995 Journal of Trauma article entitled "Humanitarian Benefits of Cadaver Research on Injury Prevention," Albert King calculated that vehicle safety improvements that have come about as a result of cadaver research have saved an estimated 8,500 lives each year since 1987. For every cadaver that rode the crash sleds to test three-point seat belts, 61 lives per year have been saved. For every cadaver that took an air bag in the face, 147 people per year survive otherwise fatal head-ons. For every corpse whose head has hammered a windshield, 68 lives per year are saved.
Unfortunately, King did not have these figures handy in 1978, when chairman John Moss of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations called a hearing to investigate the use of human cadavers in car crash testing. Representative Moss said he felt a "personal repugnance about this practice." He said that there had developed within NHTSA "a sort of cult that finds that this is a necessary tool." He believed that there had to be another way to go about it. He wanted proof that dead people in crashing cars behave exactly like living ones—proof that, as exasperated researchers pointed out, could never be obtained because it would mean subjecting a series of live humans to exactly the same high-force impacts as a series of dead
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