KANSAS CITY, Mo. - A four-month-long NBC Action News Investigation has uncovered government videos, photos, and thousands of pages of reports detailing human corpses being used like impact test dummies in NHTSA funded tests.
Experts agree that the research saves lives, but disagree on the what type of disclosure willed body programs should give donors and their families prior to the tests.
When NBC Action News watched the impact test videos carefully, side-by-side, it was difficult to see a difference between the human corpse in one video and the traditional crash test dummy in the other.
The familiar dummy and a human cadaver are positioned nearly exactly alike and adorned with the same black and yellow photo target circles on their skulls, shoulders, hips, knees and ankles.
More Common Than You Think
“This is kind of a standard frontal impact test,” said David Porta, PhD., of Bellarmine University in Louisville, Ky., describing the cadaver test video obtained though a Freedom of Information Act request by NBC Action News.
The videos obtained by NBC Action News were funded by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Professor Porta has participated in similar privately funded full cadaver tests for automotive safety studies.
“This is an example from an animal bone,” he said pointing to a video from one of his studies.
The video shows the machine creating pressure on the bone until it breaks.
Porta uses the same machine on human body parts to study how the human body will react to crash-based trauma.
“This person's ultimate gift of loaning their cadaver to us for this study is helping us fine tune how this airbag works,” Porta said about the donor shown on one of the 13 NHTSA videos obtained under our FOIA request.
Our investigation indicated it is unlikely that the donor ever had any idea he’d be contributing to automotive safety through cadaver impact testing.
Standard release forms in willed body programs reference "use in medical education or research" but don’t mention potential use in impact tests.
“No, the releases that are used at the schools I've worked with are usually very generic,” Porta said.
No Way to Tell
“This was Daddy's memorial service,” Jenny Gray says pointing to keepsake picture of her deceased father.
When Bob Morris of Kansas City, Kan., and years later, his wife Helen both decided to donate their bodies to a science, their kids supported the decision.
Like most families, they don’t know whether their parents’ remains ended up in an anatomy lab or in some form of medical research.
“They wanted to help,” Gray’s sister, Chris Rodenbaugh, says about their parents’ decision to sign a university willed body program consent form regardless of the intended use.
The family never considered the same release form allowing “medical research” could possibly be interpreted as allowing scientists to do impact tests with the bodies of their parents.
“It's kind of scary,” said Gray. “I can't picture my folks behind that kind of testing.”
Impact Tests Reviewed
Utilizing FOIA requests, NBC Action News obtained more than a dozen cadaver videos, and searched government databases with hundreds of pictures and thousands of pages of reports documenting whole corpse and partial cadaver testing.
The documents detail 4,010 tests funded by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration using full cadavers or cadaver parts since 1981.
Known as biomechanics testing in medical circles, that number is only a partial accounting of known studies and doesn’t include previous years or privately funded cadaver tests.
“In reality, injury biomechanics testing has been ongoing for more than 50 years with thousands of cadavers used to develop safety devices, improved dummies, injury tolerance, ectera,” said Carol Wood at the University of Virginia.
“Our tests involving cadavers are strictly controlled, laboratory-run sled tests that are designed to asses (sic) the tolerance of various regions of the human body to forces that may be encountered in a vehicle crash,” said NHTSA’s associate chief counsel Stanley Feldman in a written response to our FOIA request.
“This allows us to estimate the degree and type of injuries vehicle occupants may experience in a crash so that we can improve vehicle safety,” Feldman wrote.
