so what is it really like working with dead bodies so many of our students and viewers are curious about this question because many of you just see the end stage of me teaching from a heart or a brain or seeing the intestines in the body cavity and so ultimately people just want to know what occurs between the time of death all the way down to when you're looking at this brain or sagittal section on a table which means we're going to have to answer how each of these bodies ended up in our lab we'll also talk about how they're preserved like are they inbalmed in the same way as everyone else that dies or is there something different how do we literally get them here is there some sort of cadaavver delivery service and how do we dissect these bodies that is a very interesting answer as Jeffrey the skeleton for example may have had his soft tissues removed in a way that will make you look at certain bugs quite a bit differently and of course and maybe even the most important question is this guy Jonathan Bingan just a weird crazy Dexterlike person that needs psychological help well we're about to answer all these questions so let's get into this origin story of anatomical awesomeness so let's start at the beginning of the process when each one of these individuals was still alive we have seven total bodies here in the lab and each one of these individuals when they were alive chose to go to a certified body donor program and donate their body to science and education now keep in mind this is a much more in-depth process than just simply checking that box at the DMV to show that you're an organ donor on your driver's license i've literally had students be worried that they were going to end up in our lab if they checked that box totally different process like I said donating your body to science and education is more in depth it's more nuanced for example one of the things that you have to decide during this process is if you want to be a common grave or common plot body versus a return to family body now when students hear return to family body they kind of raise an eyebrow and they're thinking well you've removed this organ you've removed these soft tissues what are you exactly returning back to the family well I know where all the tissues are that belong to each individual body i know where the tissues are that belong to this body and I keep them separate from the tissues that belong to that body and so on with all seven bodies we keep the tissue separate and I know where they are because at the end of the time of educating students and utilizing the bodies for educational purposes we take every tissue every bone or whatever belongs to that body back to the body donor program and all the remains are cremated and then the ashes get taken back to the family and the return to family bodies we can keep for 2 years now if they choose to be a common grave or common plot body we still have to do the same process keep the tissue separate and we still return all the remains and they get cremated it's just that the ashes in that case get taken to a common grave site or common plot at the local cemetery but those bodies we can keep for 10 plus years for example this body back here the furthest away we've had in the lab since December of 2012 so you can see how incredible of an anatomical gift that is all of these bodies have now educated thousands of students that have come through our lab and all these are actually common grave or common plot bodies we've had a few return to family bodies but we've already returned those remains to the body donor program and then those ashes to the family but what's incredible again is that these bodies are educating thousands of people in our in-person labs and now potentially millions of people because of our educational videos on YouTube and the other social channels one of the questions that we often come across in the comment section of our YouTube channel especially if it's a new viewer is are those dead bodies just hanging out on tables wrapped in plastic bags behind them and yes this is an anatomy lab and we'll get into why we utilize these plastic bags in just a second but I'll even have students ask me prior to them coming to the lab if they need to wear like a coat or a jacket because they're thinking it's going to be cold in there for preservation purposes but it's quite comfortable in here at room temperature and the reason we can store these bodies in room temperature like this is because they have been fixed or imbalmed now you can get bodies for a cadaavver lab that have not been imbalmed and you do have to store those in a freezer but once you take those out and the thawing begins and you start your dissection or your anatomical exploration you've got about 3 to 5 days before you have to take those bodies back to the body donor program because they will start to decay but if we take a look at this body over here again all of our bodies have been embulmed and if I show you this corateed artery that I'm pulling up with a probe here on the right side of the neck this is where the imbalmer will inject the inbalming fluid and you can see once the imbalmer was done he just kind of tied it off with a string there but that imbalming fluid is going to be pumped through the cardiovascular system and this will eventually precipitate into all the tissues and start this incredible preservation process but eventually that imbalming fluid is going to have to be drained and the imbalmer will use troll cars in order to do this and what remains in the cadaavver lab is these little areas where you'll see troll carar plugs and that's just where that drainage process took place now I should also mention that during this imbalming process the blood is being removed so you're not going to be dealing with any blood in an anatomy lab also we need to continue the preservation process while we're in the lab and you don't see this during our social media videos because we do it between takes but if you were to come in as a student during our lab you'll see that periodically we'll spray the bodies with our preservative we use phoxy ethanol some other labs might use things like ethylene glycol but we use this phoxy ethanol which is this wetting agent that helps keep the tissues moist because we don't want the tissues to dry out and it also has some antimicrobial properties because we don't want any critters growing on any of the cadaavvers here something else that people are often curious about is if our bodies are prepped or inbalmed in the same way as say like a body that needs to be prepped for an open casket funeral the body that needs to be prepped for like an open casket funeral that's more of a short-term preservation whereas our bodies need to last for multiple years again this body's almost been here for 13 years and so this imbalming process for the bodies in the cadaavver lab are is going to be more of intense process a different proportion of the chemicals so that these bodies can last for multiple years so before we dive more into this anatomical awesomeness I've got to tell you about something that's part of my morning routine and no it's not performing dissection before exercising it's AG1 NextGen my go-to daily health drink now I get it starting healthy habits can be harder than pronouncing the levator labi superioris aloquene nasi muscle on your first try but AG1 NextGen that's easy all it takes is one scoop shake it up with some water drink it down and you're good to go a1 NextG is the latest most comprehensive iteration of AG1 so what about this new formula well it's got upgraded probiotics and more vitamins and minerals ag1 NextGen is also backed by clinical trials and has been clinically shown to help fill common nutrient gaps and support gut health pretty much what I consider my vitamin insurance policy plus the new travel packs make it extremely easy to take with you on the go and another great thing about AG1 NextG is that it does not taste like you're licking grass it is much more appealing to those taste receptors lining the mucosal surface of your wonderful tongue so now is a great time to give AG1 a try and you can get started with AG1 NextGen for less than $3 a day when you subscribe by going to drinkag1.com/human ananatomy or by scanning the QR code on screen thanks again to AG1 for sponsoring today's video and now let's get back to working with dead bodies so how do we get the bodies from the body donor program and into our lab well in order for me to explain this I should probably just tell you the story of when we picked up our first body now my brother-in-law his name is Jeremy he's actually my business partner here he's been married to my sister for like 28 years he's getting old but he's actually a really good brilliant entrepreneur i'm really mad that I said that out loud because he'll probably watch this and never let me live it down but he's great at business i was the education side of things so we made a really good team but he's always been kind of excited and interested in anatomy even though he's never really taken any formal anatomy classes and to this day sometimes he'll try to sound smart with anatomical terms like he'll try to describe the subacoid space but it comes out as subactoidal area and it's just that's a whole other story but uh when we first called the body donor program and set everything up he calls the body donor program he's like "All right we're ready for the first body are you guys going to deliver it?" Body donor program director's like "No you've got to come pick it up." And as this conversation went on my brother-in-law got more and more and more excited because the body donor program director then said "You got a truck?" Brother-in-law is like "Yes does it have a shell?" Brother-in-law is like "Uh-huh." He's like "Well then come pick it up." And my brother-in-law is like "Okay." So we literally have a Toyota Tacoma where we go pick up a body and we transport it from the body to donor program into our lab and sometimes when you're driving next to people on the street bringing the body from the body donor program to here you're kind of like I wonder if they realize that I'm transporting a dead body and what if we ever got pulled over by the police officers my brother-in-law is again he's probably the crazy one we can get more into that a little bit later on but he wanted to get pulled over the first time we picked up a body he like purposely tried to speed a little bit and he purposely did not put on his registration sticker on the back of his license plate even though he paid for it and it was technically registered he was hoping that a police officer would pull up behind him realize that his license plate doesn't have the proper sticker pull him over and then this would have to happen license and registration i have a dead body in my trunk i mean who thinks like that weirdo but when we get the bodies here in the lab you can see that we've wrapped them in this plastic now they initially come in a white body bag but we quickly remove them from that body bag because as we continue to preserve them and spray them with our preservative and start to do the dissection process those bags can just kind of get messy and it's really easy to replace these plastic bags i just get them at Home Depot just in this plastic rolls it's 4 mil thick and so again as long as we wrap them tightly don't let any air move in and out of the bags the bodies can stay out in this room temperature environment and be preserved for many many years so the next part of the process is dissection now this may sound a little odd but I view dissection as kind of a form of art the dissection process is the most time-conuming part of getting our bodies prepared for education many of our dissections that you've seen in our videos took hours and hours and hours to complete and one of my favorite comments that we actually get on some of our videos are comments about people asking us how we got our dissections to look so good and taking the extra time during the dissection process and kind of treating it like a form of art I actually think is more respectful to the bodies because a clean highquality dissection gives students the best educational experience possible and educating students was the main purpose for the person to donate their body to science in the first place and so dissecting in this way helps to facilitate this purpose now as far as tools that are used to dissect the bodies it's likely not going to surprise you that scalpels are used but you'll also use scissors forceps heists and even these fine needles to tease out tissues and small delicate structures and then of course you have the power tools like the bone saw to cut through bone but to get to sections like this sagittal head section that's going to be the job for the band saw using the bandsaw is not meant to be overly graphic or barbaric this tool creates some amazing cross-sectional anatomy that helps students to understand topographical relationships and to truly view the body threedimensionally now when we first got the band saw I wasn't terribly excited or satisfied with the blade that it came with and so I found this local guy who made custom bands saw blades and I told him that I wanted the finest sharpest teeth possible and he was like "Oh okay i can do that." And then he was like "Do you want it in carbon steel?" And I was like "Might as well." And so then I go pick up this blade and while I'm there he asked me what I was using the blade for and of course I couldn't resist myself i looked right at him and I said "I'm using it on dead bodies." And then there was a pause and I probably let the awkward silence go on for a little bit too long but I finally said "I own an anatomy lab." And then he was like "Oh okay." And pretended that everything was okay while he continued to take payment from someone who he thought very well could be a crazy person but what about Jeffrey the skeleton since he is a real human skeleton how are all of his soft tissues removed well obviously part of that process would be to use many of the tools that I previously mentioned to remove larger surrounding organs structures and tissues however once you get down closer to the actual bone all of those tissues that adhere directly to the bone can be quite timeconuming to remove for example the outside of your bones are wrapped in a dense irregular connective tissue called perryioium and perryostium is not loosely bound to the bone it tightly adheres to it like when I've removed perryioium on just small segments of bone I often just grab the Dremel tool to remove it but to do that to the whole skeleton again that would be quite timeconuming so you have a couple of options at this point and the second option is the creepiest and coolest option but the first option you can use a process that involves masseration bleaching and degreasing merration is where the bones are soaked in water to help soften and decompose the tissues followed by the use of chemicals and bleaching that clean and degrease the bones or you can use flesheating bugs there is a beetle called the dermested beetle these tiny critters can be used to clean skeletal remains by eating away soft tissues without damaging the bone i guess you can kind of think of it as this natural eco-friendly process that preserves the integrity of the bone for teaching and research however if the body is inbalmed those bugs are likely to be killed by those chemicals so this wouldn't be a great option for our bodies plus I for sure would have done a video by now if we had a colony of these beetles in this lab but Jeffrey was donated to us by another school and so there could have been a chance that Jeffree had an encounter with these flesheating bugs and now for the final part of the story what does it take or what kind of a person opens their own cadaavver lab and spends all this time doing dissection removing tissues and organs all while making jokes and acting like this is just a fun normal thing to do is this person disturbed and by this person we're obviously referring to me well there's two parts to this answer first I've always been fascinated and frankly humbled by the human body i remember the first time as a student when the teaching assistant handed me a human heart and I did have a split second where I was like "Oh my gosh this is a real human heart." But then that quickly turned into "This is the coolest thing ever." And I never look back and here's why you may have heard the saying "The dead teach the living." Since I first walked into a cadaavver lab as a student I anchored on this saying the people that donated their bodies to science wanted to do this they wanted to educate the living and although I'm all smiley during labs and making jokes I never make a personal joke about the bodies themselves and there are times that I do get a little serious when students first come into the lab or at least come in for their first lab experience yeah there are some that are kind of just like me that you hand them a heart and they're just super excited and fascinated right from the get-go but there are also others that are nervous about it and thinking about death is more challenging for them or maybe they recently had a loved one that passed away and so again I always have a little bit more of a serious moment at the beginning of the first lab where I talk to students about these concepts that the people wanted to donate their bodies to science and education so that they could help the living learn more about this incredible machine that we call the human body and again even though we are working with dead bodies in this lab anatomy labs are actually way more about life than they are about death because each student that comes in here each person that views our videos can now have a greater understanding about how the human body works in a way that cannot be simulated with any AI any software or any book there is nothing like seeing the real human body and now because of that you and other students can go help other people and even yourselves live longer happier healthier lives because of this amazing anatomical gift from each of these incredible body donors thank you so much for watching everyone i hope today's video kind of gave you a cool behindthe-scenes look at what we do here and gives everyone some extra appreciation for those individuals who donate their bodies to science and education and as always like and subscribe if you want to support the channel let us know what you thought of today's video and we'll see you soon