Gridiron Ganglia Gifts
It's time we made donating bodies to science cool again. So when former NFL players and a women's soccer player announce that they are going to donate their battered brains to science, one stops to think: "That's pretty cool."
Mary Roach's "Stiff" almost got us there--but a few celebrity athletes going on to be crash test dummies or med school cadavers and giving up bodies after death will be the "it" thing for Fall 2008.
When we leave our mortal coil, what good are they doing in the ground or an urn or scattered to the four winds? Religious traditions aside (those are worth heeding in my view), there are numerous good arguments for donating bodies to research. Particularly for the kind of research being done in Boston, studying brains that have experienced multiple concussions--something that could not be done in an experimental research study. Post-mortem brain donation is the only way to study the effects of head-butting.
These footballers (of both kinds) are giving a noble gift. Let them be exemplars for the rest of us. Medical students could never get through gross anatomy without their beloved cadaver, automobile companies need once living drivers in the seats to ensure us living road warriors will be safe. And as long as no money changes hands, procuring cadavers for research seems like an okay business to me.
Summer Johnson, PhD
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