by Mary Roach
Like other gelatin products, ballistic gelatin is made from processed cow bone chips and “freshly chopped” pig hide.* The Kind & Knox Web site does not include human tissue simulant on its list of technical gelatin applications, which rather surprised me, as did the failure of a Knox public relations woman to return my calls. You would think that a company that felt comfortable extolling the virtues of Number 1 Pigskin Grease on its Web site (“It is a very clean material”; “Available in tanker trucks or railcars”) would be okay with talking about ballistic gelatin, but apparently I’ve got truckloads or railcars to learn about gelatin PR.
Our replicant human thigh was cooked up by Rick Lowden, a freewheeling materials engineer whose area of expertise is bullets. Lowden works at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The lab is best known for its plutonium work in the Manhattan (atomic bomb development) Project and now covers a far broader and generally less unpopular range of projects. Lowden, for instance, has lately been involved in the design of an environmentally friendly no-lead bullet that doesn’t cost the military an arm and a leg to clean up after. Lowden loves guns, loves to talk about them. Right now he’s trying to talk about them with me, a distinctly trying experience, for I keep shepherding the conversation back to dead bodies, which Lowden clearly doesn’t enjoy very much. You would think that a man who felt comfortable extolling the virtues of hollow-point bullets (“expands to twice its size and just thumps that person”) would be okay talking about dead bodies, but apparently not. “You just cringe,” he said, when I mentioned the prospect of shooting into human cadaver tissue. Then he made a noise that I transcribed in my notes as “Olggh.”
We are standing under a canopy at the Oak Ridge shooting range, about to set up the first stopping-power test. The “thighs” sit in an open plastic cooler at our feet, sweating mildly. They are consommé-colored and, owing to the cinnamon added to mask the material’s mild rendering-plant effluvium, smell like Big Red chewing gum. Rick carries the cooler out to the target table, thirty feet away, and settles an ersatz thigh into the gel cradle. I make conversation with Scottie Dowdell, who is supervising the shooting range today. He is telling me about the pine beetle epidemic in the area. I point to a stand of dead conifers in the woods a quarter mile back behind the target. “Like over there?” Scottie says no. He says they died of bullet wounds, something I never knew pine trees could do.
Rick returns and sets up the gun, which isn’t really a gun but a “universal receiver,” a tabletop gun housing that can be outfitted with barrels of different calibers. Once it’s aimed, you pull a wire to release the bullet. We’re testing a couple of new bullets that claim to be frangible, meaning they break apart on impact. The frangible bullet was designed to solve the “overpenetration,” or ricochet, problem, i.e., bullets passing through victims, bouncing off walls, and harming bystanders or the police or soldiers who fired them. The side effect of the bullet’s breaking apart on impact is that it tends to do this inside your body if you’re hit. In other words, it tends to have really, really good stopping power. It basically functions like a tiny bomb inside the victim and is therefore, to date, mainly reserved for “special response” SWAT-type activities, such as hostage rescue.
Rick hands me the trigger string and counts down from three. The gelatin sits on the table, soaking up the sunshine, basking beneath the calm, blue Tennessee skies—tra la la, life is gay, it’s good to be a gelatin block, I…BLAM!
The block flips up into the air, off the table, and onto the grass. As John Wayne said, or would have, had he had the opportunity, this block of gelatin won’t be bothering anyone anytime soon. Rick picks up the block and places it back in its cradle. You can see the bullet’s journey through the “thigh.” Rather than overpenetrating and exiting the back side, the bullet has stopped short several inches into the block. Rick points to the stretch cavity. “Look at that. A total dump of energy. Total incapacitation.”
I had asked Lowden whether munitions professionals ever concern themselves, as did Kocher and La Garde, with trying to design bullets that will incapacitate without maiming or killing. Lowden’s face displayed the sort of look it displayed earlier when I’d said that armor-piercing bullets were “cute.” He answered that the military chooses weapons more or less by how much damage they can inflict on a target. “whether the target be a human or a vehicle.” This is another reason ballistic gelatin tends to get used in stopping-power tests, rather than cadavers. We’re not talking about research that will help mankind save lives; we’re talking about research that will help mankind take lives. I suppose you could argue that policemen’s and soldiers’ lives may be saved, but only by taking someone else’s life first. Anyway, it’s not a use of human tissue for which you’re likely to get broad public support.
Of course, the other big reason munitions people shoot ballistic gelatin is reproducibility: Provided you follow the recipe, it’s always the same. Cadaver thighs vary in density and thickness, according to the age, gender, and physical condition of their owners when they stopped using them. Still another reason: Cleanup’s a breeze. The remains of this morning’s thighs have been picked up and repacked in the cooler, a tidy, bloodless mass grave of low-calorie dessert.
Not that a ballistic gelatin shootout is completely devoid of gore. Lowden points to the toe of my sneaker, at a Pulp Fiction fleck of spatter. “You got some simulant on your shoe.”
Rick Lowden never shot a dead man, though he had his chance. He was working on a project, in cooperation with the University of Tennessee’s human decay facility, aimed at developing bullets that would resist corrosion from the acid breakdown products inside a dead body and help forensics types solve crimes long after they happen.
Rather than shooting the experimental bullets into his cadavers, Lowden got down on his hands and knees with a scalpel and a pair of tweezers and surgically placed them. He explained that he did this because he wanted the bullets to end up in specific places: muscle, fatty tissue, the head and chest cavities, the abdomen. If he’d shot them into the tissue, they might have overpenetrated, as they say, and wound up in the dirt.
He also did it that way because he felt he had to. “It was always my impression that we couldn’t shoot a body.” He recalls another project, one in which he was developing a simulated human bone that could be put inside blocks of ballistic gelatin, much as banana and pineapple chunks are floated inside Jell-O. To calibrate the simulated bone, he needed to shoot some actual bone and compare the two. “I was offered sixteen cadaver legs to shoot at. DOE told me they would terminate my project if I did that. We had to shoot pig femurs instead.”
Lowden told me that military munitions professionals even worry about the politics of shooting into freshly killed livestock. “A lot of guys won’t do that. They’ll go get a ham from the store or a leg from the slaughterhouse. Even then, a lot of them don’t openly publish what they do. There’s still a stigma.”
Ten feet behind us, sniffing the air, is a groundhog who has made unfortunate real estate choices in his life. The animal is half the size of a human thigh. If you shot that groundhog with one of these bullets, I say to Rick, what would happen? Would it completely vaporize? Rick and Scottie exchange a look. I get the feeling that the stigma attached to shooting groundhogs is fairly minimal.
Scottie shuts the ammo case. “Create a lot of paperwork, is what would happen.”
Only recently has the military dipped its toes back into the roiling waters of publicly funded cadaveric ballistics research. As one would imagine, the goals are strictly humanitarian. At the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology’s Ballistic Missile Trauma Research Lab last year, Commander Marlene DeMaio dressed cadavers in a newly developed body armor vest and fired a range of modern-day munitions at their chests. The idea was to test the manufacturer’s claims before outfitting the troops. Apparently body armor manufacturers’ effectiveness claims aren’t always to be trusted. According to Lester Roane, chief eng
ineer at the independent ballistics and body armor test facility H. P. White Labs, the companies don’t do cadaver tests. H. P. White doesn’t either. “Anybody looking at it coldly and logically shouldn’t have any problem with it,” said Roane. “It’s dead meat. But for some reason, it’s just something that has been politically incorrect from before there was a term for politically correct.”
DeMaio’s cadaver tests represent a distinct improvement over how vests were originally tested by the military: In Operation Boar, during the Korean War, the Doron vest was tested simply by giving it to six thousand soldiers and seeing how they fared compared to soldiers wearing standard vests. Roane says he once watched a video made by a Central American police department that tested their vests by having officers put them on and then shooting at them.
The trick to designing body armor is to make it thick and unyielding enough to stop bullets without making it so heavy and hot and uncomfortable that officers won’t wear it. What you don’t want is what the Gilbertese Islanders used to have. While I was in D.C. to see DeMaio, I stopped at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History, where I saw a display of body armor from the Gilbert Islands. Battles in Micronesia were so pitched and bloody that Gilbertese warriors would outfit themselves head to foot with doormat-thick armor fashioned from the twisted fibers of coconut hulls. On top of the significant humiliation of making one’s entrance onto the battlefield looking like an enormous macramé planter was the fact that the armor was so bulky it required the assistance of several squires to help maneuver you.
As with automotive cadavers, DeMaio’s body-armor bodies were instrumented with accelerometers and load cells, in this case on the sternum, to record the impact forces and give researchers a detailed medical rendering of what was happening to the chest inside the armor. With some of the nastier-caliber weapons, the cadavers sustained lung lacerations and rib fractures, but nothing that translated into an injury that—if you weren’t already a cadaver—could kill you. More tests are planned, with the goal of making a test dummy along the lines of those used by the automotive industry—so that one day cadavers won’t be needed.
Because she had proposed to use human cadavers, DeMaio was advised to proceed with extreme caution. She gathered the blessings of three institutional review boards, a military legal counsel, and a card-carrying ethicist. The project was ultimately approved, with one stipulation: no penetration. The bullets had to stop short of the cadavers’ skin.
Did DeMaio roll her eyes in exasperation? She says not. “When I was in medical school I used to think, ‘Come on, don’t be irrational. They’ve expired, they’ve donated their bodies, you know?’ When I got into this project I realized that we are part of the public trust, and even if it doesn’t make scientific sense, we have to be responsive to people’s emotional concerns.”
On an institutional level, the caution comes from fear of liability and of unpleasant media reports and withdrawal of funding. I spoke with Colonel John Baker, the legal counsel from one of the institutions that sponsored DeMaio’s research. The head of this institution preferred that I refrain from naming it and instead refer to it as simply “a federal institution in Washington.” He told me that over the past twenty-some years, democratic congressmen and budget-minded legislators have tried to close the place down, as have Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. I got the feeling that my request for an interview had brought this man’s day crashing down like so many pine trees behind a DOE shooting range.
“The concern is that some survivor will be so taken aback that they’ll bring suit,” said Colonel Baker from his desk at a federal institution in Washington. “And there is no body of law in this area, nothing you can look to other than good judgment.” He pointed out that although cadavers don’t have rights, their family members do. “I could imagine some sort of lawsuit that is based upon emotional distress…. You get some of those[cases] in a cemetery situation, where the proprietor has allowed the coffins to rot away and the corpses pop up.” I replied that as long as you have informed consent—a signed agreement from the donor stating that he has willed his body to medical research—it would seem that the survivors wouldn’t have much of a case.
The sticking point is the word “informed.” It’s fair to say that when people donate remains, either their own or those of a family member, they usually don’t care to know the grisly details of what might be done with them. And that if you did tell them the details, they might change their minds and withdraw consent. Then again, if you’re planning to shoot guns at them, it might be good to run that up the flagpole and get the a-okay. “Part of respecting persons is telling them the information that they might have an emotional response to,” says Edmund Howe, editor of the Journal of Clinical Ethics, who reviewed Marlene DeMaio’s research proposal. “Though one could go the other way and spare them that response and therefore ethically not commit that harm. But the downside to withholding information that might be significant to them is that it would violate their dignity to an extent.” Howe suggests a third possibility, that of letting the families make the choice: Would they prefer to hear the specifics of what is being done with the donated body—specifics that may be upsetting—or would they prefer not to know?
It’s a delicate balance that, in the end, comes down to wording. Observes Baker. “You don’t really want to be telling somebody, ‘Well, what we’ll be doing is dissecting their eyeballs. We take them out and put them on a table and then we dissect them into finer and finer parts and then once we’re finished we scrape all that stuff up and put it into a biohazard bag and try to keep it together so we can return whatever’s left to you.’ That sounds horrible.” On the other hand. “medical research” is a tad vague. “Instead, you say, ‘One of our principal concerns here at the university is ophthalmology. So we do a lot here with ophthalmological materials.’” If someone cares to think it through, it isn’t hard to come to the conclusion that someone in a lab coat will, at the very least, be cutting your eyeball out of your head. But most people don’t care to think it through. They focus on the end, rather than the means: Someone’s vision may one day be saved.
Ballistics studies are especially problematic. How do you decide it’s okay to cut off someone’s grandfather’s head and shoot it in the face? Even when the reason you are doing that is to gather data to ensure that innocent civilians who are hit in the face with nonlethal bullets won’t suffer disfiguring fractures? Moreover, how do you bring yourself to carry out the cutting off and shooting of someone’s grandfather’s head?
I posed these questions to Cindy Bir, who brought herself to do exactly that, and whom I met while I was at Wayne State. Bir is accustomed to firing projectiles at the dead. In 1993, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) commissioned her to document the impact effects of various nonlethal munitions: plastic bullets, rubber ones, beanbags, the lot. Police began using nonlethal bullets in the late 1980s, in situations where they need to subdue civilians—mostly rioters and violent psychotics—without putting their lives in danger. In nine instances since that time. “nonlethal” bullets have proved lethal, prompting the NIJ to have Bir look into what was going on with these different bullets, with the aim of its not going on ever again.
As to the question “How do you bring yourself to cut off someone’s grandfather’s head?” Bir replied. “Thankfully, Ruhan does that for us.” (The very same Ruhan who preps the cadavers for automotive impacts.) She added that the nonlethal munitions were not shot from guns but fired from air cannons, because doing so is both more precise and less disturbing. “Still,” concedes Bir. “I was glad when that one finished up.”
Bir copes like most other cadaver researchers do, with a mix of compassion and emotional remove. “You treat them with dignity, and you kind of separate the fact that…I don’t want to say that they’re not a person, but…you think of them as a specimen.” Bir was trained as a nurse, and in some ways finds the dead easier to work with. “I know the
y can’t feel it, and I know that I’m not going to hurt them.” Even the most practiced cadaver researcher has days when the task at hand presents itself as something other than scientific method. For Bir, it had little to do with the fact that she was directing bullets at her subjects. It is the moments when the specimen steps out of his anonymity, his objecthood, and into his past existence as a human being.
“We received a specimen and I went down to help Ruhan, and this gentleman must have come directly from the nursing home or hospital,” she recalls. “He had on a T-shirt and flannel PJ pants. It hit me like…this could be my dad. Then there was one that I went to look at—a lot of times you like to take a look at the specimen to make sure it’s not too big [to lift]—and this person was wearing a hospital gown from my hometown.”
If you really want to stay up late worrying about lawsuits and bad publicity, explode a bomb near the body of someone who has willed his remains to science. This is perhaps the most firmly entrenched taboo of the cadaveric research world. Indeed, live, anesthetized animals have generally been considered preferable, as targets of explosions, to dead human beings. In a 1968 Defense Atomic Support Agency paper entitled Estimates of Man’s Tolerance to the Direct Effects of Air Blast—i.e., from bombs—researchers discussed the effects of experimental explosions upon mice, hamsters, rats, guinea pigs, rabbits, cats, dogs, goats, sheep, steers, pigs, burros, and stump-tailed macaques, but not upon the actual subject of inquiry. No one had ever strapped a cadaver up against the shock tube to see what might happen.
