Down on the Body Farm

Newsweek, October, 2000 by Daniel Pedersen

The air smells sickeningly sweet, with honeysuckle and death. The Body Farm--the only place in the world where corpses rot in the open air to advance human knowledge--sits on a wooded hillside an easy three-minute stroll from the University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville. Not everyone comes here voluntarily. The cadaver under the honeysuckle, for instance, had been shot in the chest and abdomen after a drug deal gone wrong 10 days earlier. No one knows what happened to his headless neighbor 20 feet away--a woman found floating last summer in the Tennessee River. William Bass III, 73, the Body Farm's founder, doesn't find the scene ghoulish. "I see this as a scientific challenge," he says, as maggots work efficiently on 20 or so corpses decomposing in the early autumn sun....

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