Let’s say I want to write instructions to my family and friends that outline what I want to do with my body in case of death. What would be the most effective and helpful (in terms of furthering scientific research, reducing unnecessary polluting activity, donating my organs to those in medical need, etc.)? This would ideally involve several body disposal techniques/uses (donating organs and, when those are exhausted, donating my corpse to a body farm and so on). Sorry for the morbid question. This is not an indication that I plan on killing myself or anything.
The most effective thing you can do, I would think, would be to donate your body to a large university with a hospital that does medical research and/or trains doctors. They can do the organ transplants first, and then use the remaining parts for research and/or educational purposes. A one-stop shop if you will.
It’s really all about your age and general health. If you are in good health, organ donation will help the most individuals (and this also assumes you live in an area where there is a hospital capable of harvesting your organs.)
Now, if you have a debilitating disease your body will be better used by a research facility. I understand there are charges involved in donating your body to science.
If nobody claims our body the state will eventually have your remains creamated or buried in potters field.
Gag Gift.
Donate your body to a med school. They will take care of burial at the end of the year.
I want to be cut up for parts and what humans can’t use should be left for scavengers and microbes, but I don’t know that there’s any legal way to do that. I’ve heard of something where you can have a tree planted over your burial site rather than marble, but that doesn’t do anything about the problem of a patch of ground dedicated to my exclusive use when I no longer care.
My directive has organ donation, body parts to research, anything left over cremated. The ash to be mixed with concrete and formed into a 150 yard marker at my home golf course. The marker will go on the par 3 guarded by a pond in front - and will actually be placed 160 yards away:D.
In Australia I am registered as an Organ Donor and it’s up to the Department of Health in my state to sort out the details. I can’t leave it to a particular institution as such but can say I only want X organs used for transplants and the rest to be buried or leave the whole lot to science etc.
There’s always a sky burial.
I remember seeing a show about an organization with a large plot of land that you can leave your body to where they’ll just take it out and let nature takes its course. Not the body farm or something educational, but an actual natural burial (not that you’re buried) or something. Can’t find it Googling now, but maybe someone can.
Freeze your brain so that it will be technically possible for the people of the future to bring you, or at least an emulation of you, back.
After the organ harvest? Good taxidermy beats heck out of some tiny urn.
Donate to a body farm.
In her book Stiff, Mary Roach tells of a method of body disposal that’s just getting started in Europe (Denmark, I think), but hasn’t made it here just yet. Might be what you’re looking for. Anyway, after the aforementioned organ donation and such, the body is freeze-dried, then broken up into small pieces by either sonic waves or vibration. What remains is a bit of “mulch” that could be placed around a memorial tree.
Greenhaven Preserve is a place where you can get a ‘natural burial’. No embalming, biodegradable caskets, natural stone markers, etc.
This is what I’m starting to lean toward. I wanted to have my corpse go to a medical university, but the two main ones nearby both basically want perfect specimens who died via the Killing Curse, because the list of things that invalidates a body from consideration is a mile along and includes everything I have wrong with me except baldness and a tendency to yell when the ball game is close in late innings.
Hopefully, a body farm will be more forgiving.
Organ and tissue harvest, then the chum boat.
A joke I made on this board a while back. Boat with a gigantic wood chipper on the back end, heads out to sea and disposes of your body. Feed the fishies, help solve the over-fishing problem.
Ted Williams’ experience has pretty well contra-indicated freezing - there was a tattle-tale at the lab.
Seems the first thing they did was to drill 8 holes in his skull and insert microphones
so they could listen to the brain crack as it froze.
After that, the story is picked up here:
Until they at least figure out the basics - say, using the blood arteries and veins to circulate the liquid nitrogen so it freezes inside out - don’t expect to come back.
And ask the families of those who opted for freezing but didn’t set up a perpetual money-generating institution to pay for it - getting letters demand $X,000 “or we’ll dump him in the trash” will not generate kind thoughts toward the deceased - how many generations do you expect will give a damn about you?
You get a letter saying “Pay up or your great-great-great grandmother gets evicted” - I’m guessing you’d toss it. Do you expect your great-great-great grandchilden to give a rat’s ass about you?
In some cultures, only 3 generations get ground space - the 4th gen arriving means the oldest of the clan gets dug up to make room for the new guy.
Makes TONS more sense than devoting a large tract of land in what will, eventually become downtown.
San Francisco is an example - in the 1930’s, one of the make-work projects was to re-locate all the civilian dead from what is now very dense residential areas.
They were re-buried in Colma, a bit south. Colma CA now has the distinction of having more dead than living - another generation, and those cemeteries are going to the greenbelt along I-280 (SF has some lovely approaches) - they are completely surrounded by development, and those high-rise condos (I’m glad I had a real house - the future is not pretty) have to go somewhere
No suggestions yet for Soylent Green?
I’ve heard about this and another one that involves dissolving the whole body with lye, then pouring it into the sewer.
They both seem like over-engineered solutions to me - and I wonder if they’re just the result of the burials industry trying to be hip and relevant.
The freeze drying one is especially weird - so they freeze dry you and smash you up into a small volume of people powder - great, but how is that not going to turn back into a large amount of frankfurter meat the moment it gets wet?