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For a `body farm' and scientific data on decay

U.S. Professor seeks government funding to study how human remains decompose, on some prime pasture in Iowa

CEDAR FALLS: A Professor is seeking a U.S. Government grant to use agricultural land for a body farm — where scientists can monitor how the elements affect corpses. The Professor of Biological Anthropology at the University of Northern Iowa, Tyler O'Brien, envisions turning some prime pasture in Iowa into a body farm, where human bodies — buried, stuffed in car trunks or exposed to the elements — can provide scholars and criminalists with new benchmark data on decay.

"This idea has strong scientific value," he said. "To answer the question of how long a body has been dead, how long a person has been missing, is critical to criminal investigations."

He is seeking a grant of $400,000 to $500,000 from the National Institute of Justice and other organisations to obtain the land and set up the project.

If approved, it will be just the second such facility in the U.S., modelled after the work pioneered by O'Brien's mentor, William Bass III, at the University of Tennessee's Forensic Anthropology Centre.

Documented cases

Inside a secure1.2-hectare parcel of land near the Tennessee campus, Prof. Bass and his team have spent more than 30 years painstakingly documenting the decay of bodies buried in coffins and shallow graves, partially submerged in a pond, or exposed to bugs, rodents and hot, muggy summers.

Prof. Bass' project and research have been used to teach hundreds of criminalists and served as a centrepiece in books including crime writer Patricia Cornwell's 1994 best seller The Body Farm and Prof. Bass' own memoir, Death's Acre.

Prof. Bass believes there is a need for a second location because it is critical to study decay in different climates.Law enforcement officials see value in the research. "What happens to a body over time and why can lead us to more factual conclusions," said Eugene Meyer, director of the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation.

If Prof. O'Brien's grant is approved — and he has been rejected before — the site would be owned by the university and secured by a chain-link fence topped with razor wire around a taller privacy fence.

Bodies used at the farm would be donated by families in the region much the same as they donate a body for medical research.

At the Tennessee body farm, more than 100 people have filed donor applications this year, up from last year, and more than 600 are on file from the past 10 years. — AP

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