Mary Roach - Stiff

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 engineer 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.”