IRB Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Near the end of the book, Mary Roach explores the topics of "alternative funerals" and begins with her visit the the Colorado State University Veterinary Hospital to see how death is dealt with when relatives of the cadavers are removed as a factor. There she explains in detail the Colorado State's method of "tissue digestion" where a human corpse an be reduced to 3% its body weight through pressure heat and lye. The remnants of the corpse are then flushed down through a drain. The detailed explanation of this whole process may make her audience a bit squeamish but Roach seems to have stopped trying to defend the topic of her book whereas in the beginning she felt the need to justify it with science to persuade hesitant readers to continue.  Roach does however, still use a humor to get through heavy  material and this remains her best device throughout the book. Some of her explanations become so dramatic, they are comical and therefore somewhat balance out the extremely gruesome descriptions. In the last chapter, Roach ponders what she will do with her own remains. At first she visits the University of New Mexico Maxwell Museum of Anthropology and contemplates preserving her brain in a jar and shelving it for later students to admire and study or plastinating her body and donating it to future scientifical studies. However, at the end of the book, Roach takes a surprisingly undrastic approach and admits that although she'd love to donate her body to science, she believes it's ultimately right to let her family decide what to do with her body. For the survivors "mourning and moving are hard enough. Why add to the burden?" Through the use of humor and her moderately turned down conclusion, Roach is able to entertain the audience with her witty puns and questions and build up her credibility as a knowledgable and experienced author.