used only when functioning organs are needed, and cadavers cannot oblige. Baboons, for example, have been subjected to violent sideways head rotations in order to study why side-impact crashes so often send passengers into comas. (Researchers, in turn, were subject to violent animal rights protests.) Live dogs were recruited to study aortic rupture; for unknown reasons, it has proved difficult to experimentally rupture a cadaver aorta.
There is one type of automotive impact study in which animals are still used even though cadavers would be vastly more accurate, and that is the pediatric impact study. No child donates his remains to science, and no researcher wants to bring up body donation with grieving parents, even though the need for data on children and air-bag injuries has been obvious and dire. "It's a real problem," Albert King told me. "We try to scale it from baboons, but the strength is all different. And a kid's skull is not completely formed; it changes as it grows." In 1993, a research team at the Heidelberg University School of Medicine had the courage to attempt a series of impact studies on children—and the audacity to do it without consent. The press got hold of it, the clergy got involved, and the facility was shut down.
Child data aside, the blunt impact tolerance limits of the human body's vital pieces have long ago been worked out, and today's dead are being recruited mainly for impact studies of the body's outlying regions: ankles, knees, feet, shoulders. "In the old days," King told me, "people involved in severe crashes ended up in the morgue." No one cares about a dead man's shattered ankle. "Now these guys are surviving because of the air bag, and we have to worry about these things. You have people with both ankles and knees damaged and they will never walk right again. It's a major disability now."
Tonight at Wayne State's impact lab, a cadaver shoulder impact is taking place, and King has been gracious enough to invite me to watch.
Actually, he didn't invite me. I asked if I could watch, and he agreed to it.
Still, considering what I'll be seeing and how sensitive the public is to these things and further considering that Albert King has read my writing and knows it doesn't exactly read like The International Journal of Crashworthiness , he was pretty darn gracious.
Wayne State has been involved in impact research since 1939, longer than any other university. On the wall above the landing of the front stairs of the Bioengineering Center a banner proclaims: "Celebrating 50 Years of Moving Forward with Impact." It is 2001, which suggests that for twelve years now, no one has thought to take down the banner, which you kind of expect from engineers.
King is on his way to the airport, so he leaves me with fellow bioengineering professor John Cavanaugh, who will be overseeing tonight's impact. Cavanaugh looks at once like an engineer and a young Jon Voight, if that's possible. He has a laboratory complexion, pale and unlined, and regular-looking brown hair. When he talks or shifts his glance, his eyebrows rise and his forehead draws together, giving him a more or less permanent look of mild worry. Cavanaugh brings me downstairs to the impact lab. It is a typical university lab, with ancient, jerry-rigged equipment and decor that runs to block-lettered safety reminders. Cavanaugh introduces me to Matt Mason, tonight's research assistant, and Deb Marth, for whose Ph.D. dissertation the impact is being done, and then he disappears upstairs.
I glance around the room for UM 006, the way, as a child, I used to scan the basement for the thing that reaches through the banisters to grab your legs. He isn't here yet. A crash test dummy sits on a sled railing. Its upper body rests on its thighs, head on knees, as though collapsed in despair. It has no arms, perhaps the source of the despair.
Matt is linking up high-speed videocameras to a pair of computers and to the linear impactor. The impactor is a
There is one type of automotive impact study in which animals are still used even though cadavers would be vastly more accurate, and that is the pediatric impact study. No child donates his remains to science, and no researcher wants to bring up body donation with grieving parents, even though the need for data on children and air-bag injuries has been obvious and dire. "It's a real problem," Albert King told me. "We try to scale it from baboons, but the strength is all different. And a kid's skull is not completely formed; it changes as it grows." In 1993, a research team at the Heidelberg University School of Medicine had the courage to attempt a series of impact studies on children—and the audacity to do it without consent. The press got hold of it, the clergy got involved, and the facility was shut down.
Child data aside, the blunt impact tolerance limits of the human body's vital pieces have long ago been worked out, and today's dead are being recruited mainly for impact studies of the body's outlying regions: ankles, knees, feet, shoulders. "In the old days," King told me, "people involved in severe crashes ended up in the morgue." No one cares about a dead man's shattered ankle. "Now these guys are surviving because of the air bag, and we have to worry about these things. You have people with both ankles and knees damaged and they will never walk right again. It's a major disability now."
Tonight at Wayne State's impact lab, a cadaver shoulder impact is taking place, and King has been gracious enough to invite me to watch.
Actually, he didn't invite me. I asked if I could watch, and he agreed to it.
Still, considering what I'll be seeing and how sensitive the public is to these things and further considering that Albert King has read my writing and knows it doesn't exactly read like The International Journal of Crashworthiness , he was pretty darn gracious.
Wayne State has been involved in impact research since 1939, longer than any other university. On the wall above the landing of the front stairs of the Bioengineering Center a banner proclaims: "Celebrating 50 Years of Moving Forward with Impact." It is 2001, which suggests that for twelve years now, no one has thought to take down the banner, which you kind of expect from engineers.
King is on his way to the airport, so he leaves me with fellow bioengineering professor John Cavanaugh, who will be overseeing tonight's impact. Cavanaugh looks at once like an engineer and a young Jon Voight, if that's possible. He has a laboratory complexion, pale and unlined, and regular-looking brown hair. When he talks or shifts his glance, his eyebrows rise and his forehead draws together, giving him a more or less permanent look of mild worry. Cavanaugh brings me downstairs to the impact lab. It is a typical university lab, with ancient, jerry-rigged equipment and decor that runs to block-lettered safety reminders. Cavanaugh introduces me to Matt Mason, tonight's research assistant, and Deb Marth, for whose Ph.D. dissertation the impact is being done, and then he disappears upstairs.
I glance around the room for UM 006, the way, as a child, I used to scan the basement for the thing that reaches through the banisters to grab your legs. He isn't here yet. A crash test dummy sits on a sled railing. Its upper body rests on its thighs, head on knees, as though collapsed in despair. It has no arms, perhaps the source of the despair.
Matt is linking up high-speed videocameras to a pair of computers and to the linear impactor. The impactor is a
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