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Oregon has legalized human composting

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Re: Oregon has legalized human composting

#151

Post by arkush »

"Recompose, the country’s first human composting funeral home does it like this: a corpse is placed in a cylinder with organic materials, like wood chips, plants, and straw, then heated and turned repeatedly for several weeks with a hook until it’s broken down into a nutrient-rich soil that can be delivered back to the family or used for planting."

Every time I read about using human corpses to produce soil, I recall this article:

"Grass plants bind, retain, uptake and transport infectious prions"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4449294/

In the past I read about this or similar startup and they mentioned that they don't accept corpses of people diagnosed with prion diseases. IMHO, this is not enough. For example, a person with early CJD could die of other cause and never be diagnosed. Besides that, sporadic CJD isn't as rare as "1 per million" (still rare though).

Here is an interesting video about prion diseases that, among other things, discusses epidemiology ("1 in 7000 US deaths"):

"Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease and Other Prion Diseases - Brian Appleby, M.D."

https://youtu.be/4vyuby6gibs?t=328

Testing of corpses based on Protein Misfolding Cyclic Amplification (PMCA) might come in handy (if it's not too expensive). It is claimed to be very sensitive. Here is presentation by Dr. Rodrigo Morales (one of the authors of the article about prion uptake by plants that I linked above):

"Texas CWD Symposium: Pre-symptomatic prion detection"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8ZX8sHAPUw

P.S.: Hopefully, this eco-burial fad wouldn't catch on. How about deep sea burials?

Re: Oregon has legalized human composting

#153

Post by mark-wagner »

xwdv wrote: post #143

If a plant such as a tree is grown from your remains don’t you basically “become” the tree? I’ve always thought it would be great if one could become some kind of long lasting tree that could last generations and could be visited upon by ancestors, but I don’t know how practical such graveyard forests would be.

Just like the "fathertrees" from Card's book "Speaker for the Dead."

Re: Oregon has legalized human composting

#154

Post by agumonkey »

Y_Y wrote: post #29
1-6 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since prions are found abundantly in the head, just bury or lock away the skulls and treat them like nuclear waste. Compost or cremate the rest of the body.

This is a solved problem! My startup is building modern, cutting-edge catacombs where we're redefining what it means to have a huge, underground maze full of decomposing human heads.

> cutting-edge

missed opportunity or subtlety mastery ?

Re: Oregon has legalized human composting

#155

Post by maxerickson »

learc83 wrote: post #81
jhgb wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's hope that that "something" wasn't smaller populations.

There were smaller populations of humans, but not smaller populations of mammals in general.

With our skill at making meat, I wonder how true that is.

Re: Oregon has legalized human composting

#156

Post by rkagerer »

xwdv wrote: post #143

If a plant such as a tree is grown from your remains don’t you basically “become” the tree? I’ve always thought it would be great if one could become some kind of long lasting tree that could last generations and could be visited upon by ancestors, but I don’t know how practical such graveyard forests would be.

That's neat I've felt the same instinct.

Re: Oregon has legalized human composting

#159

Post by yosamino »

arkush wrote: post #151

"Recompose, the country’s first human composting funeral home does it like this: a corpse is placed in a cylinder with organic materials, like wood chips, plants, and straw, then heated and turned repeatedly for several weeks with a hook until it’s broken down into a nutrient-rich soil that can be delivered back to the family or used for planting." Every time I read about using human corpses to produce soil, I recall…

I hope when it's time for me, I can simply be flushed down the drain:

> Alkaline hydrolysis is also used in the agricultural industry to sterilize animal carcasses that may pose a health hazard, because the process inactivates viruses, bacteria, and prions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkaline_hydrolysis_(body_disp...

Re: Oregon has legalized human composting

#160

Post by heavyset_go »

jhgb wrote: post #65
BitwiseFool wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prions are scary, but the fact that prions have presumably existed for just as long as life has existed on Earth, there must be something that keeps prions from replicating out of control and causing mass death and extinctions.

Let's hope that that "something" wasn't smaller populations.

Something like 100 billion people have died in the last 50k years, and it doesn't really seem like prions from their corpses have been a problem.
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