Eternal rest
Here’s a way for Chico State University to overcome its reputation as a party school: start a “farm” where students can observe how bodies decompose out in the open.
Turhon Murad, a forensics anthropology professor at Chico State, thinks a body farm would enhance the university’s reputation in this important field.
The proposal, a blend of scholarly respectability and “news of the weird” luridness, is an immediate conversation stopper. It shows great potential for distracting us from talking about drunken college students, a subject that seems prosaic by comparison.
My brain tells me that a body farm is a logical extension of donating one’s body to science. And it’s ecologically sound. We come from dust; we return to dust. After we die, bugs and microbes lie in wait to recycle our bodies. The custom of embalming and entombing our bodies to stave off decay seems vain and pointless.
But my gut, which has a habit of reacting more quickly than my brain, recoils at the idea of a body farm. Even after my brain has grasped the program’s noble intentions, I still feel a little queasy. It seems sacrilegious. The belief that the dead should occupy a special place — in a grave or as ashes scattered across a favorite piece of the countryside — is hard to shake. In most cases, bodies that have had organs removed from them or have been cut open and examined for an autopsy ultimately make their way to a final resting places.
So far, my brain is losing the argument that to let bodies lie in the open so that students can watch them decompose is ethically acceptable. The idea of depriving bodies of a resting place until they completely disintegrate sticks in my craw.