eeeewwwww

yes\r\n

where did you find any info on how to donate?

I believe a codon is a triplet of an amino acid sequence which will code for a certain amino acid, while a messenger RNA is made up of many codons that will in the end produce a long polypeptide chain, which will become a protein when it is released from the ribosome.

can't they still get you a nice plot and headstone so as to have a place to visit you? i mean after all you're not really there in either case.

you can still have an open casket. no one needs to see your inner organs! and then your buried so they can't see your body anyway.

Why do you think you would be squeamish about being examined and studied AFTER you are dead? Why is this such a problem for people? **NEWS FLASH** You're dead, nothing matters to you any longer.

Why u say that anyway???\r\n

Try thinking of all the doctors that treat you now...where do you think they learned it? "Practicing" is about as important as it gets!

There is no substitute for practice, and practice on human bodies. Would you want to be operated on by a surgeon who had never had this kind of look at your organs and structures and who didn't have the "feel" of a human body?

That said, bodies aren't easy to come by, and medical schools use them carefully. Usually a team of anatomy students is assigned to a single cadaver, and they carefully dissect it, bit by bit, over the course of the class. They extract every bit of practice they can, using parts of bodies as many times as possible. And many doctors describe being profoundly grateful to "their" cadavers and the families who donated them.

But donating your body for anatomy lessons and surgical practice isn't the only possibility. Human bodies are also used to study, for example, the effects of various restraints and airbags during automobile crashes, or the protection offered by military equipment (boots, vests, helmets) to soldiers confronted by mines, improvised explosive devises, or ballistics. Researchers get all the data they can from crash test dummies wearing accelerometers and impact recorders, and from ballistic gelatin, but, in the end, human bodies are the gold standard for studying what happens to human bodies.

I think that Bryan has already suggested it, but I highly recommend the book "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers," by Mary Roach. She describes the many uses of human cadavers and how they advance our knowledge. It's a surprisingly entertaining read.

One more thing: you don't have to donate your body to science after you're dead if you want to participate in vaccine research. They need LIVE volunteers for those kinds of clinical studies. Here's a list of vaccine trials going on right now that are looking for volunteers.

Being an organ donor is a little bit different than leaving your body to science. Sometimes the two are mutually exclusive, but you can do both in some cases.

You can only be an organ donor under a specific, narrow set of circumstances. According to the Musculoskeletal Transplant Foundation,

"In general, organ donors must be brain dead, which is defined as the complete cessation of all functions of the brain. In these very limited cases (approximately 20,000 per year), organ donation occurs when mechanical support (i.e., ventilators) can continue the viability of the organs for a short period of time after the death of the patient. Organs (heart, liver, kidney, etc.) must be carefully matched to waiting recipients. Matching is done according to factors such as blood type, medical status of the recipient and size of the waiting recipient. Tissue donation may occur from patients who are either brain dead, or who have suffered cardiac death, the cessation of the heart. Consequently, there are many more potential tissue donors than organ donors. Tissue recipients do not have to be matched to their donors, as rejection is not generally a concern."

90,000 people are waiting for donated organs. Each day, 74 people receive one, and another 18 people die waiting. The US Department of Health and Human Services runs a website with the myths and facts about organ donation, information on how to become an organ donor in your state, and other resources.

(Why should minorities be particularly concerned about organ donation?)

Whole body donation is handled differently than organ/tissue donation for transplantation. The arrangements are made through individual medical schools, research facilities, and other agencies. Here's a list of medical facility body donation programs in the US. And here's information about leaving your body to the Forensic Anthropology Center ("The Body Farm") at the University of Tennessee (where, incidentally, being an organ donor does not prevent donation of your body).

I think it is important to donate both body and organs. As I do not believe in embalming,(which to me is humiliating) or cremation. Plus the idea of being put in a box and having my corpse dressed up for family and friends to pass by and cry over is ridiculous. And I would like more information on how to go about donating my body after I die.

Danielle,

It's generous of you to consider donating your organs. You should talk to your family and make sure they know your wishes. (It's especially important that YOU do this, since you're under 18 and your parents will have to make the decision for you if you're in a tragic accident or something.)

Here is information about how to do it. And if you scroll down to the part about "Anatomical Bequests at the University of Minnesota," you'll find a description of how at least one body donation program deals with donors' remains after they have been used for research or education.

Or maybe you're just wondering how hospitals deal with donors' bodies after organs are removed? Organ donation is a fast process: every minute counts for health of the organs and the people the organs are being transplanted into. After organ removal, a donor's body is closed up and can be treated like any other body according to the family's wishes. Immediate burial, embalming, or cremation are all possible.

There are very few "excess" bodies.

The vast majority go to medical schools and surgical conferences so doctors can learn anatomy and practice their skills.

A very, very small number of bodies, through certain programs only, are used to test protective equipment, such as the boots worn by mine sappers, or bulletproof vests. And most donation programs will let you opt out of such research programs.

In the case of the boots study, researchers used 20 donated human bodies to see if they could offer soldiers more protection than the standard-issue boot. (Some footwear is actually more dangerous than wearing sandals or going barefoot, since IF a mine exploded, shrapnel from the shoe itself could be driven into the foot, creating more damage and causing infection.)

The research group would have used surrogate "dummy legs" instead of cadavers, but they weren't available. (Researchers are trying to create the equivalent of the automotive industry's crash test dummies so that cadavers won't be necessary. Some are in the works now, and one--the "Frangible Surrogate Leg"--has been tested in Australia.) But test results on surrogates might not match up to damage experienced by humans. When the boot researchers compared data from the "Frangible Surrogate Leg" and actual human legs, for example, the bone fracture patterns didn't quite match.

That said, surrogates are preferable, not only because most of us are kind of uncomfortable with this kind of use for donated bodies. Surrogates are uniform, and human bodies are anything but.

From Mary Roach's book Stiff (pp 150-152):

"LEAP [the boot study]...turned out to be a valuable study. The sandal myth was mildly vindicated (the injuries were about as severe as they were with a combat boot), and one boot--MedEng's Spider Boot--showed itself to be a solid improvement over standard footwear (although a larger sample is needed to be sure). [The project leader] considers the project a success, because with land mines, even a small gain in protection can mean a huge difference in a victim's medical outcome. 'If I can save a foot or keep an amputation below the knee,' he says, 'that's a win.'
It's an unfortunate given of human trauma research that the things most likely to accidentally maim or kill people--things we most need to study and understand--are also the things most likely to mutilate research cadavers: car crashes, gunshots, explosions, sporting accidents. ...'In order to protect against a threat, whether it is automotive or a bomb,' observes [Aris Markis, who works for Med-Eng Systems, which makes protective gear], 'you have to put the human to its limits. You've got to get destructive.'"

www.anatomicgift.com handles all of the east coast including Florida.

Respect for the donors is something that every good body donation program emphasizes. Your body will never, in any way, be "a chunk of meat only to be thrown to the dogs."

Some anatomy programs actually return donors' remains to the families. Others cremate them, but have a ceremony every year where the cremated remains are buried, the anatomy students come to pay their respects, and families are invited to come say goodbye one last time AND to hear about what the anatomy experience has meant to these future doctors.

Every doctor I've ever heard speak on this topic has expressed only gratitude for the donors who made their education possible.

Any reputable donation program, such as the Anatomy Bequest Program at the University of Minnesota, will be up-front with potential donors about those issues.

There's no reason to go into it blind. And an ethical program shouldn't LET people go into it blind. This is a responsibility that Dave Lee, Director of the U's program, takes very seriously. (We featured him as an "expert on the spot" when BODY WORLDS was here. Read what he had to say.)