ALTRUISTIC people sometimes donate their bodies to science, but usually they imagine they will be used to train medical personnel or help learn about diseases or other conditions.
However that didn't end up being the case for a woman in Arizona in the USA, whose corpse ended up being sold to the US Army for use in a so-called "blast testing" experiment.
Newsweek has reported on the case of Doris Stauffer, who suffered from Alzheimer's Disease in her final years before dying aged 74 in 2013.
Her son Jim donated the body to the Biological Resource Center in Maricopa County, and some days later received a wooden box containing her ashes without an explanation of how the body was used.
Assuming it was part of brain research, he was shocked some time later to find that the body was instead used by the military to measure damage caused by roadside bombs.
"She was supposedly strapped in a chair on some sort of apparatus, and a detonation took place underneath her to basically kind of get an idea of what the human body goes through when a vehicle is hit by an IED," he told news reporters.
Stauffer said a box on the consent form had specifically mentioned something about explosions, "and we said no, we checked the 'no' box on all that".
Reuters says at least 20 bodies donated to the Center were sold to the army for blast experiments.
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