In the show “Breaking Bad”, a frequent method of body disposal used is to drop it in a plastic barrel, and fill the barrel with hydrofluoric (IIRC) acid. In particular, I’m curious if any DNA would survive to allow identification of the body.
(Just kidding about needing the answer fast, of course. Oh, and if you are thinking about responding with “You do know the show is fictional, right?” do the human race a favor and kill yourself before you reproduce. )
I don’t know about DNA but acid bath disposal is not a foolproof method of body disposal, as this guy found out.
Hydrofluoric acid is seriously nasty stuff. You can get some on you and not realize it, and it’ll penetrate your skin and eat away the bone, unless you can treat it rapidly with calcium gluconate. Scroll down to see the pictures at the bottom of the Wikipedia page:
This isn’t just some unlikely chemical accident. I knew someone who lost portions of a finger due to such undetected HF exposure. Sloshing around enough to dissolve a body will expose the person doing it to such exposure, not to mention the considerable risk of inhaling some.
Concentrated nitric, hydrochloric, or sulfuric acid is pretty nasty, too, but I’d rather use those than hydrofluoric acid. The only real reason to use HF is if you want to be sure you get rid of silicates, like glass. Not much of that in a human body.
While hydrofluoric acid is very bad for living things, it isn’t a particularly strong acid in terms of dissolving bodies. It’s also pretty lethal to inhale or touch, so not exactly practical.
This is a real world example of someone who tried it.
It’s an old case and possibly now there would be DNA evidence retrievable but at the time the traces of the last victim found were human gall stones and dentures so that sounds fairly successful in getting rid of the body.
Edit: beaten too it I see Gyrate
I wish I could remember what it was: my co-worker was cleaning at an oil well, and the drilling mud had some acid or base in it. It was uncommonly used. He was unaware of of its presence, and got some under his glove.
When I first met him weeks later, he had a terrible wound on the back of his hand, and he said that the injury was ongoing; the stuff was in his skin, and would continue to destroy tissue. He wasnt aware of the injury until it was too late.
I think he either declined to have tissue surgically removed, or they couldnt get it all. He was a singularly stupid old man in a number of ways, very hidebound in his ways.
It wasnt as bad as a brown recluse spider bite, but it was pretty messed up. Since he was around 70 years old, declining in health, it probably wasnt ever going to heal properly.
I think Breaking Bad just wanted to use an acid that sounded scary. hydrofluoric acid is extremely dangerous more so because of its toxicity than its ability to dissolve organics (used mostly for glass [silicates] and metals, and the fluoride is going to be particularly attracted to the calcium in your body).
Also, I don’t think HF is particularly strong when it comes to destroying proteins or sugars, the DNA might have a much better chance of surviving than if they’d gone with something a bit more realistic like sulfuric acid, or even better—a really strong base, like lye.
Lye would be much more readily available, destroy almost all the tissue, then, I could see Walter White using HF to dissolve any remaining remnants of the skeleton or metallic artifacts (especially oxides).
That isn’t to say that enough HF (and they were using gallons of the stuff) wouldn’t do that to a body, the tub, and the floor. And if I remember correctly, there were plenty of, um… chunks.
Whatever you do, don’t use quicklime (Calcium Oxide) to try to destroy the corpse. As generations of forensic scientists have pointed out, quicklime doesn’t destroy corpses – it preserves them. Always good to remember if you want to live to enjoy the fruits of your crime.
Typical referrence:Why NOT to use Quicklime to Dispose of a Corpse | INTO MURDER,KILLERS,FORENSICS? read on...
Dissolving in lye is called Alkaline Hydrolysis. If you do it with heating to 320 F it takes about three hours. (If you don’t heat it, I don’t know how long it takes). But apparently this method does work, without undue risk to you. And Lye has to be a lot easier to get than large suspicious quantities of HF.
Findimng a body-sized lye-proof container, a place to put it all, a heat source (f desired) and somewhere to pour out the liquified body is your own lookout.
According to Burt in “Return of the Living Dead”, Aqua Regia is more powerful than sulfuric acid
Its only attribute is that it will also dissolve any gold fillings.
There seems to be a persistent mneme about “strongest” something as a universal property. So something that attacks either glass or gold, must therefore be the most potent at attacking organic tissue, plastics, or whatever else.
Even boiling in sodium hydroxide is going to leave a significant amount of waste product that will have a clear signature of “this was once an animal” to it. Explaining why you needed to render down the carcase of some random 100kg animal is going to be difficult at best. You could add salt and make some soap I guess.
Okay chemists, if HF isn’t particularly good at doing away with a corpse, what works best? Sulfuric acid or lye have been suggested. Anything else?
How in the world is it possible for something like this to happen, without you knowing about it? Does it dissolve your nerve endings so fast that you don’t feel a thing? Even so, wouldn’t you feel some serious unpleasant sensations around the edges at least?
What you really need is some good ol’ chlorine trifluoride and a good pair of running shoes… 
May, however, not be the best choice if you’re seeking to keep a low profile…
Read the link I posted above on hydrofluoric acid. The relevant portion is this:
Two questions:
1). If I’m going to use NaOH to dissolve a corpse, how much do I need? Let’s assume a 200-pound body.
2). As soon as I get my bathtub replaced after that nasty HF fiasco, can I use that instead of a plastic barrel? Then as soon as Vito is completely liquefied, I can just pull the stopper and send him on his merry way to the Pacific Ocean, right?
KOH may work better. You can get it in concentrated form as a wood stripper. It shouldn’t harm a glazed tub but it could dissolve the resins in fiberglass tubs. Soft tissue should just turn to goo that you can send down the drain. I don’t know what would happen to bone and sinew. You’ll also have fillings, implants, and the piece of Lego that Vito swallowed when he was a kid left over.
They used KCl (Potassium Chloride) in some drilling and well completion applications.
KCl is a salt, neither acid nor base (In fact, you can make salts by reacting an acide with a base, such as KOH and HCl in this case).
It’ll get your corpse all salty, and enough will actually preserve it. But it won’t dissolve the corpse.
I just assumed it was an acid or base. To him it would have seemed an acid anyway, and thats what he told me. Its been years since, and it was all of a 30 second conversation, so I am really rusty on details, sorry.
It burned him, though he apparently wasnt immediately aware of it, so I’d guess that it might have affected the nerves in his skin. If he exhibited general symptoms of being poisoned, I wasnt privy to it. I never worked with him long.