Science Experiments from the Afterlife
Forensic anthropologists, microbiologists, and entomologists study donated cadavers to determine how human bodies decompose.
Hannah joined The Scientist as an assistant editor in 2023. She earned her PhD in neuroscience from the University of Washington in 2017 and completed the Dalla Lana Fellowship in Global Journalism in 2020.
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Not long after arriving at Sam Houston State University in 2007, entomologist and micromoth expert Sibyl Bucheli received a mysterious phone call that would change the course of her life.
“Are you going to the crime scene?” asked the voice on the other end of the line, without introduction or preamble. “No,” Bucheli replied, and hung up the phone.
Later, though, the woman on the phone, a researcher in the forensics department, brought part of the crime scene to Bucheli’s office. It was a human scalp. Intrigued, Bucheli examined it and identified several interesting moths, including the caterpillar stage of a case-making clothes moth. “In the wild, it eats dead and decomposing animals with fur,” said Bucheli. “And as the caterpillar gets larger, it increases the size of its silk shelter that it carries on its body.” In this instance, the caterpillar had enlarged its shelter using the deceased individual’s hair, from which the team successfully extracted mitochondrial DNA.1 In the future, this technique could aid in identification, if detectives could access the caterpillar shelters but not the cadaver itself.
In the following years, Bucheli has worked extensively with the Southeast Texas Applied Forensic Science Facility (STAFS), a research center that accepts human body donations for the purpose of advancing scientific understanding of the biology of death. Bucheli explores the temporal patterns of insects and microbes present during various stages of human decomposition—work that is admittedly macabre, but provides an essential comparator for criminal death investigations. “Crime scenes are what we call a snapshot in time…you don’t know what happened before recovery,” said Bucheli. “At the body farm, we get this gift of time, this [ability to perform a] longitudinal study, which is really important.”
To learn more about becoming an integral part of this scientific endeavor posthumously, check out the information about body donation to STAFS or similar facilities.
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- Bucheli SR, et al. J Forensic Sci. 2010;55(4):1130-1132.
