Or, for a fee of a few hundred bucks, your family can have your ashes delivered to them. Body-donation programs follow the guidelines spelled out in the Uniform Anatomical Gifts Act, the legislation that governs disposition of bodies and body parts for dissection, research and transplantation in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Cincinnati's program is one of the largest in the country, accepting up to 300 bodies a year, compared to the 70 that UC-Irvine accepts annually. Most of us feel a certain obligation. Indeed, most universities do take a kinder, gentler approach to the bodies.
Some programs hold annual memorial services for cadavers used throughout the year.
In a particularly scenic ritual, officials at the University of Hawaii gather the friends and families of donors along with the medical students who studied the bodies. They pay tribute to the departed, and then the students paddle canoes a mile out from Honolulu Harbor and scatter the ashes into the deep- blue Pacific. Part of the answer is that there is no centralized umbrella organization monitoring willed- body programs around the country. The structure of accountability fluctuates wildly from university to university. Many programs, like the one at Montana State, report to state-level agencies.