She said the school's candor has not hurt donations. Wayne State gets about 175 cadavers a year and uses about 5 percent of them for research. At Ohio State, Hines and her team dress the cadavers and strap them into car-like crash sleds. Then they slam, jerk and jolt the bodies, using sensors to determine where injuries occur. Without these generous donations, we wouldn't be able to get accurate test readings about what happens in a car crash, and cars would be much more dangerous.
Automakers use cadaver tests to develop new safety features.
The federal government uses them to set mandatory safety standards for all cars. For example, after dozens of small children were killed by deploying air bags three years ago, the federal government determined it could safely reduce the inflating pressure of the air bags by 20 percent to 35 percent. It based the new standard on crash tests involving 35 cadavers . At Duke University, Barry Myers uses cadaver heads, necks and spines to study the body's reaction to falls and crashes. He repeatedly dropped 20 heads and necks a few inches to a few feet and measured the impact.