Anyways, apparently these types of institutions have a hard time getting funding and there is a lot of moral and ethical debate floating around over the use of human cadavers for such things. I guess maybe because, for instance, people who are against war or oppose guns and whatnot might not be so comfortable knowing that their deceased loved one is being shot in the face, the dummy for bullet testing and therefore perpetuating, indirectly, guns. At least that's what I got from the whole thing.
And what all of this made me think about, among other parts of the book, if not just the subject of the whole book itself, is that... I'm starting to believe that once we die, we leave our bodies behind and the bodies we once occupied were never really ours to begin with. Your body is just a vessel. When you die, you're just leaving behind a machine of which you were once the operato (in some people's cases, a smooooth operator).
I had never given all that much thought to this theory before today. I'm not a religious person but I am definitely spiritual, and I firmly believe in souls. I don't necessarily believe in a heaven or a hell but I know there is more on earth than just what we can see with our naked eyes. We share the earth with billions of souls, and my newfound realization kind of brings up the question of reincarnation. If our bodies are just hosts, does that mean that once our soul moves on, it then finds a new live host? Whoa nelly! I never know what to think about all of that stuff. My point is that I am already a card-carrying future organ donor. I have always supported donating my body to science. But now I feel even more confident in that decision. I don't want my rotting corpse just wasting away in a coffin. And I don't particularily want to be creamated because I know exactly how creamation is done, and what happens to your body in the process... and it's actually pretty disturbing. It almost seems selfish not to donate our bodies to science once we're done with them. The dead are not just dead. Once we're dead we can still contribute. Our bodies can provide lives, can provide hope, can provide scientists with facts and research, can help to determine exactly why we ended up dead (an example is the chapter that discusses airplane crashes and the fact that the bodies in the wreckage are pretty much the key factor in helping to determine what went wrong).
I don't really have any kind of catchy, conclusive end-thought here. I'm just saying that a) I'm definitely okay with someone shooting bullets into my face when I'm dead if it will help save lives, b) I'm becoming morbidly fascinated with this stuff.
The end!
Ps. When you ride an elevator, do you ever pretend that it's a time machine?
Try it. It's fun.
