Regarding Tuesday’s letter from Stephen P. Roberts, an associate professor at UNLV’s School of Life Sciences:
I can appreciate Dr. Roberts’ disappointment that a body farm he was trying to develop for Metro Police in Southern Nevada was unsuccessful. Although such a facility would be of great value to forensic pathologists working in desert environments, it is almost impossible to fund.
In the early 1960s my office-mate in the Radiation Ecology Section of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory was Jerry A. Payne, who spent the summers of 1962 and 1963 studying the importance of insects to the decomposition of carcasses in forested habitats at Clemson, S.C.
He placed baby pig carcasses in screened cages that either excluded all scavengers or allowed access only to insects. On a daily basis he weighed the carcasses, identified the types and relative abundance of insects, and took time-lapse photographs of the decomposition process. He also recorded the climatic conditions during the exposures. He identified more than 500 species of insects that invaded the carcasses in a predictable pattern of succession.
Forensic pathologists recognized the significance of the work and he was called on to lecture at many of their meetings. So much interest was generated that he decided to conduct similar experiments in other major ecosystems: What you observe in moist hardwood forests wasn’t what you would observe in semiarid grasslands or in deserts. But funding was unavailable and Jerry had to limit the scope of his studies for a doctoral dissertation.
In 1971 the faculty at the nearby University of Tennessee was able to independently justify and fund the now world-famous body farm that studies the decomposition of donated human cadavers in the environment. But similar facilities weren’t supported in other ecosystems, such as in Southwest deserts.
Even the successful TV series “CSI” hasn’t generated a groundswell of support for Dr. Roberts’ Nevada body farm, although the field of forensic pathology would benefit greatly from such a facility.
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