humans.
Oddly, Representative Moss was not a squeamish man when it came to dead bodies; he had worked briefly in a funeral parlor before he entered politics. Nor was he an especially conservative man. He was a Democrat, a pro-safety reformer. What had got him agitated, said King (who testified at the hearing), was this: He had been working to pass legislation to make air bags mandatory and was infuriated by a cadaver test that showed an air bag causing more injury than a seat belt. (Air bags sometimes do injure, even kill, particularly if the passenger is leaning forward or otherwise OOP—"out of position"—but in this case, to be fair to Moss, the air bag body was older and probably frailer.) Moss was an oddity: an automotive safety lobbier taking a stand against cadaver research.
In the end, with the support of the National Academy of Sciences, the Georgetown Center for Bioethics, the National Catholic Conference, a chairman of a noted medical school's anatomy department who stated that "such experiments are probably as highly respectful [as medical school anatomy dissections] and less destructive to the human body,"
and representatives of the Quaker, Hindu, and Reformed Judaism religions, the committee concluded that Moss himself was a tad "out of position." There is no better stand-in for a live human in a car crash than a dead one.
Lord knows, the alternatives have been tried. In the dawn of impact science, researchers would experiment on themselves. Albert King's predecessor at the Bioengineering Center, Lawrence Patrick, volunteered himself as a human crash test dummy for years. He has ridden the crash sled some four hundred times, and been slammed in the chest by a twenty-two-pound metal pendulum. He has hurled one knee repeatedly against a metal bar outfitted with a load cell. Some of Patrick's students were equally courageous, if courageous is the word. A 1965 Patrick paper on knee impacts reports that student volunteers seated in crash sleds endured knee impacts equivalent to a force of one thousand pounds. The injury threshold was estimated at fourteen hundred pounds. His 1963
study "Facial Injuries—Cause and Prevention" includes a photograph of a young man who appears to be resting peacefully with his eyes shut.
Closer inspection hints that, in fact, something not at all peaceful is about to unfold. For starters, the man is using a book entitled Head Injuries as a headrest (uncomfortable, but probably pleasanter than reading it).
Hovering just above the man's cheek is a forbidding metal rod identified in the caption as a "gravity impactor." The text informs us that "the volunteer waited several days for the swelling to subside and then the test was continued up to the energy limit which he could endure." Here was the problem. Impact data that doesn't exceed the injury threshold is of minimal use. You need those folks who don't feel pain. You need cadavers.
Moss wanted to know why animals couldn't be used in automotive impact testing, and indeed they have been. A description of the Eighth Stapp Car Crash and Field Demonstration Conference, which appears in the introduction to its proceedings, begins like a child's recollections of a trip to the circus: "We saw chimpanzees riding rocket sleds, a bear on an impact swing….We observed a pig, anaesthetized and placed in a sitting position on the swing in the harness, crashed into a deep-dished steering wheel…."
Pigs were popular subjects because of their similarities to humans "in terms of their organ setup," as one industry insider put it, and because they can be coaxed into a useful approximation of a human sitting in a car. As far as I can tell, they are also similar to a human sitting in a car in terms of their intelligence setup, their manners setup, and pretty much everything else, excluding possibly their use of cupholders and ability to work the radio buttons, but that is neither here nor there. In more recent years, animals have typically been
Oddly, Representative Moss was not a squeamish man when it came to dead bodies; he had worked briefly in a funeral parlor before he entered politics. Nor was he an especially conservative man. He was a Democrat, a pro-safety reformer. What had got him agitated, said King (who testified at the hearing), was this: He had been working to pass legislation to make air bags mandatory and was infuriated by a cadaver test that showed an air bag causing more injury than a seat belt. (Air bags sometimes do injure, even kill, particularly if the passenger is leaning forward or otherwise OOP—"out of position"—but in this case, to be fair to Moss, the air bag body was older and probably frailer.) Moss was an oddity: an automotive safety lobbier taking a stand against cadaver research.
In the end, with the support of the National Academy of Sciences, the Georgetown Center for Bioethics, the National Catholic Conference, a chairman of a noted medical school's anatomy department who stated that "such experiments are probably as highly respectful [as medical school anatomy dissections] and less destructive to the human body,"
and representatives of the Quaker, Hindu, and Reformed Judaism religions, the committee concluded that Moss himself was a tad "out of position." There is no better stand-in for a live human in a car crash than a dead one.
Lord knows, the alternatives have been tried. In the dawn of impact science, researchers would experiment on themselves. Albert King's predecessor at the Bioengineering Center, Lawrence Patrick, volunteered himself as a human crash test dummy for years. He has ridden the crash sled some four hundred times, and been slammed in the chest by a twenty-two-pound metal pendulum. He has hurled one knee repeatedly against a metal bar outfitted with a load cell. Some of Patrick's students were equally courageous, if courageous is the word. A 1965 Patrick paper on knee impacts reports that student volunteers seated in crash sleds endured knee impacts equivalent to a force of one thousand pounds. The injury threshold was estimated at fourteen hundred pounds. His 1963
study "Facial Injuries—Cause and Prevention" includes a photograph of a young man who appears to be resting peacefully with his eyes shut.
Closer inspection hints that, in fact, something not at all peaceful is about to unfold. For starters, the man is using a book entitled Head Injuries as a headrest (uncomfortable, but probably pleasanter than reading it).
Hovering just above the man's cheek is a forbidding metal rod identified in the caption as a "gravity impactor." The text informs us that "the volunteer waited several days for the swelling to subside and then the test was continued up to the energy limit which he could endure." Here was the problem. Impact data that doesn't exceed the injury threshold is of minimal use. You need those folks who don't feel pain. You need cadavers.
Moss wanted to know why animals couldn't be used in automotive impact testing, and indeed they have been. A description of the Eighth Stapp Car Crash and Field Demonstration Conference, which appears in the introduction to its proceedings, begins like a child's recollections of a trip to the circus: "We saw chimpanzees riding rocket sleds, a bear on an impact swing….We observed a pig, anaesthetized and placed in a sitting position on the swing in the harness, crashed into a deep-dished steering wheel…."
Pigs were popular subjects because of their similarities to humans "in terms of their organ setup," as one industry insider put it, and because they can be coaxed into a useful approximation of a human sitting in a car. As far as I can tell, they are also similar to a human sitting in a car in terms of their intelligence setup, their manners setup, and pretty much everything else, excluding possibly their use of cupholders and ability to work the radio buttons, but that is neither here nor there. In more recent years, animals have typically been
Similar Books
