They’ve had their lower legs broken by simulated bumpers and their upper legs shattered by smashed-in dashboards.
It is not pretty, but it is most certainly justifiable. Because of changes that have come about as a result of cadaver studies, it’s now possible to survive a head-on crash into a wall at 60 mph. In a 1995 Journal of Trauma article entitled “Humanitarian Benefits of Cadaver Research on Injury Prevention,” Albert King calculated that vehicle safety improvements that have come about as a result of cadaver research have saved an estimated 8,500 lives each year since 1987. For every cadaver that rode the crash sleds to test three-point seat belts, 61 lives per year have been saved. For every cadaver that took an air bag in the face, 147 people per year survive otherwise fatal head-ons. For every corpse whose head has hammered a windshield, 68 lives per year are saved.
Unfortunately, King did not have these figures handy in 1978, when chairman John Moss of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations called a hearing to investigate the use of human cadavers in car crash testing. Representative Moss said he felt a “personal repugnance about this practice.” He said that there had developed within NHTSA “a sort of cult that finds that this is a necessary tool.” He believed that there had to be another way to go about it. He wanted proof that dead people in crashing cars behave exactly like living ones—proof that, as exasperated researchers pointed out, could never be obtained because it would mean subjecting a series of live humans to exactly the same high-force impacts as a series of dead humans.
Oddly, Representative Moss was not a squeamish man when it came to dead bodies; he had worked briefly in a funeral parlor before he entered politics. Nor was he an especially conservative man. He was a Democrat, a pro-safety reformer. What had got him agitated, said King (who testified at the hearing), was this: He had been working to pass legislation to make air bags mandatory and was infuriated by a cadaver test that showed an air bag causing more injury than a seat belt. (Air bags sometimes do injure, even kill, particularly if the passenger is leaning forward or otherwise OOP—“out of position”—but in this case, to be fair to Moss, the air bag body was older and probably frailer.) Moss was an oddity: an automotive safety lobbier taking a stand against cadaver research.
In the end, with the support of the National Academy of Sciences, the Georgetown Center for Bioethics, the National Catholic Conference, a chairman of a noted medical school’s anatomy department who stated that “such experiments are probably as highly respectful [as medical school anatomy dissections] and less destructive to the human body,” and representatives of the Quaker, Hindu, and Reformed Judaism religions, the committee concluded that Moss himself was a tad “out of position.” There is no better stand-in for a live human in a car crash than a dead one.
Lord knows, the alternatives have been tried. In the dawn of impact science, researchers would experiment on themselves. Albert King’s predecessor at the Bioengineering Center, Lawrence Patrick, volunteered himself as a human crash test dummy for years. He has ridden the crash sled some four hundred times, and been slammed in the chest by a twenty-two-pound metal pendulum. He has hurled one knee repeatedly against a metal bar outfitted with a load cell. Some of Patrick’s students were equally courageous, if courageous is the word. A 1965 Patrick paper on knee impacts reports that student volunteers seated in crash sleds endured knee impacts equivalent to a force of one thousand pounds. The injury threshold was estimated at fourteen hundred pounds. His 1963 study “Facial Injuries—Cause and Prevention” includes a photograph of a young man who appears to be resting peacefully with his eyes shut.
Closer inspection hints that, in fact, something not at all peaceful is about to unfold. For starters, the man is using a book entitled Head Injuries as a headrest (uncomfortable, but probably pleasanter than reading it).
Hovering just above the man’s cheek is a forbidding metal rod identified in the caption as a “gravity impactor.” The text informs us that “the volunteer waited several days for the swelling to subside and then the test was continued up to the energy limit which he could endure.” Here was the problem. Impact data that doesn’t exceed the injury threshold is of minimal use. You need those folks who don’t feel pain. You need cadavers.
Moss wanted to know why animals couldn’t be used in automotive impact testing, and indeed they have been. A description of the Eighth Stapp Car Crash and Field Demonstration Conference, which appears in the introduction to its proceedings, begins like a child’s recollections of a trip to the circus: “We saw chimpanzees riding rocket sleds, a bear on an impact swing…. We observed a pig, anaesthetized and placed in a sitting position on the swing in the harness, crashed into a deep-dished steering wheel….”
Pigs were popular subjects because of their similarities to humans “in terms of their organ setup,” as one industry insider put it, and because they can be coaxed into a useful approximation of a human sitting in a car. As far as I can tell, they are also similar to a human sitting in a car in terms of their intelligence setup, their manners setup, and pretty much everything else, excluding possibly their use of cupholders and ability to work the radio buttons, but that is neither here nor there. In more recent years, animals have typically been 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.”