Key Points
- Body farms and taphonomy
- Forensic research
- Donating your body to science
Dr Maiken Ueland grew up in Norway obsessed with crime fiction and television shows, dreaming of a career solving real crimes. Fast forward a few decades and she’s living in Australia and helping to run a cutting-edge forensic research facility that studies human decomposition to aid law enforcement and emergency services.
Anthony and Nadine spoke to Dr Ueland about her work at the Australian Facility for Taphonomic Experimental Research (AFTER), the first facility of its kind outside of the United States. Here she and her team use donated bodies to study the decomposition process in varied environments and conditions.
It's an absolutely incredible thing to see people wanting to donate their bodies to the work that we're doing.
While AFTER’s primary remit is in assisting and training law enforcement in crime investigations, they have extended their research to help find missing persons and locate people, living and dead, following mass disasters. Plus, Dr Ueland even hunts down stolen or trafficked wildlife in her (minimal) spare time.
Not for the faint of heart, this episode includes a crash course in body decomposition - of humans and pigs - and some hard truths about TV crime dramas. Proceed with care.
LISTEN TO
Weird Science: How Chemistry is Helping One Woman Solve Crimes
SBS Audio
09/04/202440:32
Links
Grave Matters is an SBS Audio podcast about death, dying and the people helping us understand both better. Find it in your podcast app such as the SBS Audio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or LiSTNR.
Hosts: Anthony Levin and Nadine J. Cohen
Producer: Jeremy Wilmot
Writers: Anthony Levin and Nadine J. Cohen
Art and design: Karina Aslikyan
SBS team: Max Gosford, Joel Supple, Caroline Gates
Guest: Dr Maiken Ueland
If you'd like to speak to someone, you can reach a counsellor at Beyond Blue at any time, day or night, by calling 1300 22 4636 or visiting . Also, Lifeline offers 24/7 crisis support on 13 11 14, and supports people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. In an emergency call 000.
Transcript
Content warning: This episode mentions death, body decomposition and other potentially difficult content. Please take care.
Anthony: Nadine Ja Rule Cohen, how are you?
Nadine: Anthony Levin, hi. I'm good. How are you?
Anthony: Good, good.
Nadine: So Lev Dog, as you’re affectionately known, sometimes not so affectionately known. Would you consider donating your body to science?
Anthony: Well, certainly not while I'm using it.
Nadine: But seriously, have you ever thought about it?
Anthony: Yeah, I have. Something that comes to mind is an article I read in Nat Geo about this woman, Susan Potter, who donated her body to science. And what they did was, they sliced her body into 27,000 pieces and then they digitised them, and it's called Immortal Corpse. It sounds like a video game but it's not. It's basically this amazing resource that medical students can access through the US National Library of Medicine.
And I kind of thought that was cool because instead of her body just ending up, like in a freezer in some lab in a medical school somewhere, she's got huge reach and people will be able to look at those samples for a really long time and learn things about the human body. So I thought that was really cool and it'd be nice to have that kind of impact if possible.
What about you?
Nadine: I've thought about it and like, I'm an organ donor, but it's another step to donate your whole body, and it doesn't sit great with me. Partly just because, you know, as we've discussed before, we're very attached to our bodies. And also, even though I'm non-practising in Judaism, the body is supposed to go whole into the Earth. And that's a thing. And I think I want to know more about what “for science” means. Like, for what science? This is making me want to watch Weird Science.
Anthony: It's a classic. Yeah, I mean, I get it.
Nadine: Thank you for that.
So it's estimated that fewer than 2000 Australians donate their bodies to science each year, which seems pretty low to me. The overwhelming majority end up at universities in aid of medical research or to train the next generation of doctors, nurses, medical scientists and other health professionals.
In today's episode, we're looking at a different kind of university programme that's using donor bodies to help find missing persons, locate bodies after mass disasters, living and dead, and solve crimes. We also learn how much TV crime shows have lied to us.
Nadine: Are you a crime fan? A true crime fan?
Anthony: I am not in terms of fiction, but I do watch and have listened to true crime content: television and podcasts. The one that stayed with me the most and really kind of gripped my attention was The Staircase, the docu-series, and I just became obsessed with blood spatter patterns. When I was at home I was just like spilling the ketchup, you know, and just challenging my wife to like, work it out.
Nadine: What happened here?
Anthony: What happened? Work it out. Solve it.
Nadine: I forgot to put a lid on the blender when making tomato soup a few weeks ago. So someone would have been able to come over and work out what happened there because it was all over me and the kitchen.
Anthony: And it's, look it's not good to make light of people being gruesomely murdered. I would never do that. But I actually do think it's a fascinating part of forensics.
And the other part of that story that gripped me was the legal issues. That's unsurprising, I guess, given my profession and how challenging it was to kind of work it out. That's true of a lot of these shows. Like they have their problems, they can be fraught and biassed.
Nadine: Yes, that's the entertainment bit.
Anthony: That's right.
Nadine: Our guest today is Norwegian scientist Dr Maiken Ueland, who studies human decomposition to help solve crime. She's an emerging leader in the field of forensic taphonomy. We'll let her tell you what that means in a second.
Dr Ueland is currently a research fellow at the Centre for Forensic Science and the Deputy Director of the Australian Facility for Taphonomic Experimental Research. We didn't know what that meant either.
***
Nadine: Hello. Welcome to Maiken Ueland. Thank you very much for joining us.
Maiken: Thanks for having me.
Nadine: We're gonna start off with the basics. What is forensic taphonomy?
Maiken: So taphonomy is a Greek word that comes from taphos and nomos, which means burial in the context of law. But what we define it as is anything that happens to an organism from the moment they stop breathing, so stop being alive, and until they're found.
And we use how the body breaks down during this time period to help assist law enforcement with a whole range of different questions like locating missing persons, determining how long the individual has been deceased, etcetera.
Nadine: And AFTER - the facility’s excellent and very fitting acronym - is, as I understand it, the first facility of its kind outside America?
Maiken: Yes, that's correct. So these facilities only existed in the US, there were about eight or so. And then in 2016, we started AFTER here in Australia as the first one outside of the US.
Nadine: And they're often called body farms?
Maiken: They are. It's not my favourite.
Anthony: I didn’t think it would be.
Maiken: Because we don't grow humans, so it's not really a farm in that context. So we prefer a taphonomic research facility, but doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
Nadine: And why did Australia need one? How did it come about that we got one? Which was not that long 2016?
Maiken: I think it was February 2016. We opened and we needed this facility because a lot of work has been done in the field of taphonomy using pigs as models for humans. And at the time, we didn't know how well they actually represented what happens with the human body.
Similarly, just the way the body breaks down and how that is so influenced by the environment. And all these external factors meant that we couldn't just take the data from the US and apply it to our case here in Australia. And that's because the vegetation is going to be different. The climates are different, the insect populations and even the scavengers that are helping in this process are different between the US and Australia.
Nadine: You mentioned that climates are different and the climate is different within Australia. Your facility is in Sydney and we have a particular climate, but obviously, it's very different to Tasmania or to Western Australia.
How applicable is your work across even national terrain?
Maiken: There'll be some things that we need to consider. Having a body decompose in a desert environment is going to be quite different here to down in Tasmania because of the temperature, the humidity, all of these things that affect the way the body breaks down.
So in the perfect world, we'd have these facilities in all of the extreme environments to cover all aspects of Australia. So that just becomes a limitation. But what we do is when we do the research, we account for temperature, we account for the climate as much as we can into the models that we're making so that we can kind of control it, but it is a limitation.
***
Anthony: How comfortable are you with death?
Maiken: Quite comfortable, I'd say.
Anthony: You were always that way?
Maiken: Yeah, I was, I think. And it might be a generalisation but I think in Northern European culture it's it's talked about a fair bit more. It's not as hush-hush as it is in some other cultures.
And just because of the virtue of what I do, I’m around death quite a lot.
Nadine: Was this career path always an aim of yours? Like, when did you decide that this was what you wanted to do? Or what came first, the science or the forensics?
Maiken: A little bit of everything. So I grew up reading Scandinavian crime. Who doesn't? I absolutely love it. Like, Norwegians are obsessed with crime. All we do is watch crime on TV and read crime novels.
So from a very young age, I really wanted to be some kind of detective and try and help solve crime. But I had such a love for science; I wanted to use science to do it, and I didn't actually know what forensics was when I was growing up. It wasn't such a widespread thing back home.
So I just thought I had to go to medical school, become a medical doctor, and then join the police in some roundabout way. So I was quite lucky that I ended up finding forensic science and got lost in just Googling the term and figuring out where I could go study it.
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Anthony (VO): Dr Ueland received her Bachelor of Science in 2012 from the University of Ontario Institute of Technology in Canada before undertaking a PhD at the University of Technology, Sydney, where she remains today.
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Maiken: So we have a really beautiful facility that’s owned and operated by UTS - University of Technology Sydney, where I'm based. But we have a range of different partner organisations that are mainly from law enforcement agencies that can come out and use the facility.
We do a lot of training events, how to search for missing persons, for example, and then we do recoveries. How to best recover individuals or the victims, but also any type of evidence that might be, say, in a burial scenario; what might the grave tell us about the event and what happened; and potentially then also finding the perpetrator, which is the goal. We also have universities that will come out and do a whole range of different types of research.
We do research from the moment the person passes away and comes out to the site. So pretty much from what we denote as our day zero of the process, up until we have skeletal remains. And then we have a range of different activities during that whole process, where we're learning information about what's happening on a chemical and a biological scale, and how can we develop methods to determine, for example, how long the individual's been dead for.
Because that's such a crucial piece of information that we don't know enough about. On TV, it looks so simple. Everyone always asks me, what about CSI? Like, how do you feel? What about Bones? And on those shows, you'll see, they'll come out, they'll sniff the air, touch the shoulder of the body and look at their watch and go oh, yeah, this person died three days ago at 5:42.
In reality, it's not that easy. I wish it was, it would solve a lot of our problems. But in reality, it's really hard to determine how long an individual has been dead for and that's such a crucial piece of information that law enforcement agencies need with trying to find the perpetrator, corroborate witness statements and exclude suspects.
***
Nadine: Maiken, your facility opened in, you said 2016…
Maiken: Yes, that’s correct.
Nadine: And we're now in 2023. So it's been - my maths is terrible, but I'm thinking that's seven years. I'm not allowed to do maths on this show, it always goes badly.
So when did you get your first, you call them donors - the body?
Maiken: Yeah, we use the term donors because that's what they are. They're individuals who've donated their bodies to science, specifically saying they want to come to the AFTER facility.
Nadine: And so when did you get your first donor, and where are they at?
Maiken: We actually, we got three on the first day we opened and that was a bit of a happy coincidence. We had two frozen bodies that we were going to put out in February 2016, and that was just to test our processes, making sure that everything that we were doing was working before we officially opened and started getting donors.
And then there just happened to be an individual that was on the donor list that passed away and was also coming out on that day. So rather than testing our processes, which we’d spent a lot of time setting up with the two frozen donors that we’d pre-planned for, we got a third one.
So started started with a bang, which is really good because then we also got to test a few other things, like how far away do the plots have to be from each other to make sure that we're not cross-contaminating any of the research. And because we had three individuals at the same time, we were able to do a lot of those studies to try and figure out how to best manage the site.
So they're still out there. So we keep the donors for as long as we still have research ongoing. So those donors are now skeletal and we have forensic anthropologists and archaeologists that will come in and do their type of research with the skeletal remains. OK.
Anthony: And so, we're going to get a bit graphic here but what factors reduce the body from being a donor when it arrives to being a skeleton over that period of time?
Maiken: So there's a few processes, there's a range of chemical processes in the body that will happen. Traditionally, we'll use a number of stages to kind of categorise what's happening.
So first we have the individual - they'll look just like they did while they were alive. We call that the fresh stage, where there's not too much activity. You'll get a bit of insect activity, there’ll be a bit of a smell and then it will go into a bloat stage.
So you’ll actually see the abdomen becomes a bit distended and that's because there's a lot of build-up of gases because of what's happening in the body now that the bacteria are not helping you, they're kind of working against you now and using the body as a food source. So they'll start breaking up the cells inside the body and that will release all the macromolecules, the fats, the proteins, the carbohydrates. And they will start to break down as well and that causes a lot of gases as by and end products. If they don't have anywhere to go, it will cause what we call bloating. It sounds quite graphic, but it's just a slight distension of the abdomen.
And then we'll have a rupture event which again sounds very graphic. It's not like a balloon popping, it's a lot less dramatic than that. What that is, it will just be an opening that happens and all of the fluid and gases will be released into the environment.
Anthony: OK. And there's no way of knowing where or how that opening will happen? This is just an organic process?
Maiken: It’s just an organic process. There'll be like breakdown, usually on the part of the body that's touching the soil underneath, if it's a a person on the surface.
Anthony: And scavengers play a role along the way as well, presumably?
Maiken: They do.
So we'll get insects., we'll get flies come in first. They'll be attracted by the smell of bodies, just like they do, you see flies will come circle if you've left a steak out for too long or if you haven't taken your rubbish out. So you get those early flies, they'll come in, they'll lay eggs and then those eggs will turn into larvae. And then there's a few different stages of the larvae where it will start consuming that soft tissue.
Insects are really incredible in what they do, and they're a massive part of the process of breaking down that soft tissue in the body.
Nadine: And that's a bit you don't control? You can't control the atmosphere? You can't control if flies come or flies don't come or how many come?
Maiken: No, so we just observe that, we just monitor. We have projects where people will actually collect the insects and they'll identify them to see what insects, what type of fly or beetles are coming at what stage and how long they're staying for as well.
***
Anthony: You mentioned earlier about how unrealistic these tele-dramas are when they're sniffing the air and that sort of thing. But odour actually plays a really important role in your research, doesn't it?
Maiken: It does.
So I do a lot of research into odour - we call it volatile organic compounds, or VOCs for short. And those are the chemicals that are incorporated into the smell. So they're the chemicals that give the gases the smell that they have.
We do a lot of work with odour because we work with search and rescue and cadaver detection dogs for example. So what we try to do is determine what is the odour made up of and how does it change over time? And then we can use that to train the scent detection dogs, but we can also use it to develop new technologies.
We've developed electronic nose technology to try and have a sort of robot version of the dogs that can operate for longer periods of time, and they're a lot easier to transport.
Nadine: Not as cute, though.
Maiken: Not as cute. Definitely not as cute.
But the big thing about the dogs that's frustrating for me is that they cannot speak. And because they cannot verbally communicate exactly what they're smelling, we need to back it up by the chemistry to see what is actually happening. What are the compounds that are being responsible for the smell? And then we use that to better train the dogs but also to train our other technology approaches.
Nadine: The work that you're doing with odour like globally, is this quite new? Has smell just been kind of taken for granted in a way in this area?
Maiken: Yes and no.
So there's been studies for up to 20 years about what the smell is made up of, but we haven't had good enough technology, I think, to really get into the nitty-gritty of what's actually there and that's the space that's been growing.
I do a lot of work on mass disasters and there hasn't really been much in that space for mass disasters. There's been more from the dogs’ point of view but not really from the chemical point of view and to developing new technologies.
***
Anthony: What constitutes a mass disaster for your research purposes?
Maiken: So we have these two different categories of disasters. So we have our natural disasters like our earthquakes, floods, fires - which is a big one here in Australia. And then we have our man-made disasters, which can be like building explosions, deliberate plane crashes, etcetera. So it's a whole range of these different disasters that we’re trying to investigate so that we can better find missing persons, both living and deceased, in those scenarios.
But we're also doing training on how can we better process those unique scenarios. Because it's not really something that we've been able to study well in the past. It's been more ad hoc when disasters have happened. Then individuals have gone out, search and rescue, for example, and then they run through their protocols.
But because there hasn't really been a facility where we've set up these disasters like we're doing, it's been more ad hoc. Whereas now we recreate disasters. We'll simulate a building collapse, for example, and we'll have a number of donors in different configurations and then we'll have building debris on top so that you can't see anything visually. And then we'll have the dogs come out and search. We'll use the electronic nose technology to try and search and see if we can find where the donors are and then we'll also use it as a training event.
So when the disaster, from a research perspective, when we've left it long enough, we get law enforcement agencies to come in and they'll recover all of the individuals. And they're coming in blind, so they don't know anything about the disaster, they don't know where the donors are, etcetera, and it's their job to find them, but also process the crime scene and take them through the whole process - of entering the scene, processing the scene, recovering the individuals - and then also taking them through to try and find the identity of the individuals, take samples, etcetera.
Nadine: How easy is it to do in terms of like, so fires, floods - bodies, are going to be in very different situations and very different states, how do you create those sorts of environments?
Maiken: So those two extremes we have not been able to do yet because of our ethical restrictions around what we can and can't do with the donors. We do now have the ability to do fire-related studies, as long as we have the consent of the donors that are signing up and their families, so they know what's involved and what’s not.
Anthony: I can remember reading an article about some donors in the United States who later found out, much to their shock, that the bodies of their loved ones have been used in nuclear testing, and I'm guessing that ethics approvals and regulations in Australia would be more stringent and prevent such a thing from happening here. Because the last thing you'd want is to find out that your loved one has been blown up.
Maiken: Most definitely.
We are really transparent about what is going to happen to the individuals that sign up. We’ll give them a little bit of information about what it actually means to come to a taphonomic research facility because it's quite unique and quite different from just donating your body to science, which is more general.
We have a large committee that will look over every single project proposal that comes in for the research that they want to do at AFTER and we'll evaluate that based on the ethics. So is it ethical? Is this something that really needs to be done? And is it scientifically valid?
Because we want to make sure that every single donation has value because it is such a massive gift, it's an absolutely incredible thing to see people wanting to donate their bodies to the work that we're doing.
Nadine: Are you testing underwater at all?
Maiken: We don't have the ability at the moment to test underwater. They are doing a lot of work overseas using pigs, but none that I know of using humans yet. It is something that we're looking into because we're an island, so it is something that we come across.
Anthony: And just the likely prevalence and intensification of flooding events.
Maiken: Yeah, and that as well is going to change now. I think as the climate is changing, we're seeing more flash flooding events, more heavy rainfall floods - it’s definitely something that we are thinking about.
***
Anthony: So we've talked a bit about how bodies decompose and you explained the various stages. What are some common misconceptions about this? You know, most people are thinking of Weekend at Bernie's - you know, the body's fine for a few days.
Maiken: I think one of the common misconceptions is that it can vary based on your sex and your race. It's something I get asked quite often and I honestly did not really properly consider that the sex - we've tested to see if there is a difference, but there really isn't.
So I always get asked which people decompose differently than others, which I've found quite strange.
Nadine: Wow.
Anthony: Who is asking these questions? They should be reported to the police.
Nadine: Yeah, that's fascinating.
Does age play into it at all?
Maiken: So our donor population, just based on the way the facility works, we're relying on donations. Our donor database is a bit skewed, that is one of our limitations. So we have majority Caucasian individuals and elderly.
Our very first year being operational, we were male-heavy. I think we had almost all male donors and that's now luckily evened out too. We have a good sex distribution but we are still leaning towards an elderly population.
***
Anthony: What have you learned about body decomposition through your work that you didn't know a few years ago?
Maiken: The whole taphonomy field for many years was reliant on using pigs as models, and that's because they're the closest to humans in terms of internal anatomy and fat distribution. So both species are omnivores and will eat anything. And a lack of heavy fur.
So pigs have traditionally been used, and they still are being used for taphonomic research. And we'd done pigs for a few years before we opened the facility, just across the road. So we'd been in that same environment with studying pigs. And then when we got our first human donors and we realised that what we knew was not good enough, they break down differently.
And one big thing that we see is, for example, the stages that I mentioned, with the pigs that will happen with the whole unit. So the pig as a whole will be in one specific stage at a time which makes it a lot easier to determine time since death, whereas for humans we find that you can have several stages at once, or something we call differential decomposition. So it's not as clear-cut as it is with the pigs.
So that meant that we had to start a bit fresh with some of the knowledge that we had and we spent the first two years getting a really good understanding of what happens to humans specifically as the body breaks down. We're seeing a lot of mummified tissue - so that's just like dry, leathery skin that happens and it forms a protective layer on the individual and it will slow down the decomposition process. And that's something we weren't necessarily expecting to see as much as we did.
***
Nadine: Why was the area where the facility is, why was that specific place chosen? Was it just this is where we have access to land? Or was it like this is the Ideal environment?
Maiken: It's been more on the access side of things. So it was a site that was already owned by UTS and wasn't used for anything. But it is quite perfect, it's ended up being really good for us because it is quite a remote area and it's heavy bushland so it looks like a lot of the casework that we deal with, which is really good because it means we get a really good understanding of what happens in those environments.
There are a lot of missing individuals that have gone, like bushwalkers gone hiking, or more criminal cases where because we have a lot of huge national parks, it's been quite a happy coincidence that this was the land that we were able to use.
Anthony: I have to say I get a message from NSW police on my phone about a missing person about once every couple of months because I live near bushland and I was really surprised when I moved to that area how frequently it happens that someone goes missing during a walk in the bush.
And the police are searching for them, and often they find them, but they're deceased. So the research you're talking about, it sounds like it's absolutely on point for our local terrain, just here around Sydney and in other parts.
Maiken: Yeah definitely.
And we're not just looking for deceased individuals. We are also developing and testing technology to locate living missing persons as well. So the electronic nose technology for example. And what we're doing with the dogs, we're also looking at living individuals.
Anthony: So there is a genuine prospect that this research could help save people's lives by detecting them before their exposure leads to their death, potentially?
Maiken: In my dream world or my dream future, we'll have amazing capabilities to find missing individuals. That's something I'm really passionate about as one of my big research areas is trying to find ways to find all these missing people, ideally before they pass away, which is the same in mass disasters.
So in disaster events, you're going to have both. You're probably going to have living individuals that can be hidden, and then you'll have deceased individuals, which is equally as important to recover them and provide information to the families. We want to make sure that we have technology that can find both of those types of victims.
Anthony: Yes, and it seems like that's going to become increasingly pertinent research because of the climate crisis that we're in. This is a subject we've discussed and we'll be discussing in this series. And as we’ve observed, the climate crisis is accelerating and that no doubt has an impact on your research and on the kinds of conditions that you're observing, and also trying to simulate.
Maiken: It does because there is an increase in disaster events now. So this really is quite urgent research that we need to do because we need to be a lot better prepared so that we're proactive rather than reactive when these disasters strike.
***
Anthony: How might changing climate conditions in Australia affect the way we choose to dispose of bodies?
Maiken: Oh, I’ve not really thought about that. I think more about criminal scenarios. I think a lot of criminals are borderline lazy. Because people will ask me, oh surely like there'll be deep graves and that's where what you need to search for. And I'm like, no, in reality, it's really hard to dig a grave.
Something I unfortunately have experience with but from a research perspective is that you see shallow graves because that is the easiest to do and I think in a world where the climate is changing, you're also potentially going to see disposal areas change because you're not going to have the same access that we might now.
Anthony: Yeah, I reckon Borderline Lazy is a great title for an Australian crime show. It probably describes most criminals in Australia, I reckon.
Maiken: Yeah, we come across a fair bit of that and I do often get asked what's the perfect way of disposing of a body. People can't resist asking me.
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Nadine (VO): We resisted asking her.
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Nadine: Do you ever lie about what you do? Like at a dinner party or something, just to avoid these conversations.
Maiken: I do.
Anthony: I love that you admitted that.
Maiken: I'll happily admit it.
Sometimes people will ask me so, what do you do? And I'll just start with I'm a chemist. And then most of them will leave it at that. But then if they keep asking more questions, then I'll admit it. I'm happy about what I do.
Nadine: What's the strangest thing about your job? Or is none of it strange to you now?
Maiken: I do have some days where we'll put on a research project and I'll step back and think this would be so strange in any other scenario. But for me, it's just what we do and nothing's really strange because it all has a really good, valid purpose.
I think some of the strange things I do that I also find strange is that, for example, I had to get someone to build me a hood, a see-through hood, so that we could put living participants under the hood. They lay down there and then we chemically smell them. But just as I was building this, I had to say like, oh I'm going to be needing it to be this long because there's going to be a person underneath, and you do get quite a lot of strange looks.
And sometimes I go to Bunnings and I need to ask like, oh, I kind of need something for this very specific strange purpose…
Nadine: Bunnings is calling the police every time. “She's here again. She wants a tarp and some rope.”
Anthony: “She’s asking for the chemical solvents.”
Maiken: Tarp and tape is quite a frequent purchase.
Anthony: So when you say hood, do you mean the hood of a car?
Maiken: Oh sorry it's like a big transparent box.
Anthony: OK, OK, got it.
Maiken: Yeah, we call it a hood because we place it on top of the donors or of the living participants.
Nadine: You can't just get away with saying living participants and have me not ask about that.
Anthony: Who are these volunteers?
Nadine: Is that you guys like, taking turns?
Maiken: No, so we have ethics approval to sample living individuals of a range of populations, as much diversity as we can, to try and come up with some chemicals that are consistent between living individuals. Because that's what we want to use to train the dogs, but also to train the technology that we're building.
Anthony: How long would I have to stay under the hood?
Maiken: Uh, it's really comfortable. We can play music. We take it for about an hour to get enough samples.
Anthony: OK, I'm going to book in.
Maiken: If you're stressed, yeah, come by the university. We'll get you all comfortable and then and then we'll chemically smell you.
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Nadine (VO): This is Anthony's second cry for help in this series since wanting to get into a dark tank. in our interview with Mariam Adati in episode four. I was beginning to worry.
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Anthony: What is it like being around dead bodies most of your week?
Maiken: For me it's it's quite peaceful actually, and I find it a really nice environment. And that's because we have these donors whose wish was to come and help out, and they're making a contribution which I think is really beautiful. And it's just a space to be quite thankful for and just making sure that you're honouring their wishes as best as possible.
People ask is AFTER a gruesome place to go to and it's really not. It’s a beautiful bush environment, yeah, calm and quiet, quite a serene place, I think, and we're using death to our benefit essentially, to try and prevent more deaths in the future.
Nadine: What's the most rewarding thing for you about the work you do? I mean, it sounds like there's a lot.
Maiken: There is quite a lot.
I think the most rewarding is when I've worked on some cases where I've been given feedback from the families. So real cases where there's been information given to the families that have given them some peace. And to be able to see your work have a real-world application is really rewarding and it makes the work all worth it.
Anthony: I guess on the flip side, what's the biggest challenge?
Maiken: The biggest challenge, I think, is just to not become complacent because you are around death a lot and you're around a lot of deceased individuals. You can become a bit blasé about it and I think that's the biggest danger that you can have being in the work that I'm in.
So it's really just making sure that everyone who's working at the site has the awareness of what's happening, and really respecting and understanding the gift that the donors have given us.
***
Nadine: Random question: are there any television crime shows that don't make you cringe?
Maiken: I try to just watch them as a like, a casual observer and pretending I have no knowledge and just enjoy it for what it is which is entertainment.
I am a massive fan of true crime, so I do get into that. I'll watch the documentaries and everything. I'm fascinated by it still, despite the work that I do, I still think it's quite fascinating.
And I will watch like, Criminal Minds and Bones, just for the entertainment value.
Nadine: Is there sometimes where you're like oh, that's an idea. Like, does it give you any pause for thought in certain cases?
Maiken: Sometimes there will be a true case. Like, I'll listen to a true crime podcast and they'll try a few different tests and I’ll be like oh, that's not a bad idea. If I was in a similar scenario I would be like oh, that might actually be something to remember. But usually, I just consume it as a casual viewer or listener.
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Nadine: Something that we've been asking all our guests, something that this podcast has been looking into and soul-searching for, is the concept of a good death. What's a good death to you?
Maiken: For me it would be peaceful, ideally surrounded by loved ones, and I think just dying knowing that you've done what you wanted to while you're alive. I think that is a good death when you can look back and feel satisfied with the life you've lived.
Nadine: Well, thank you, Maiken, for coming in.
Maiken: Thank you, thanks for having me.
Anthony: It’s been great having you on the show, thanks.
***
Nadine: So that was Dr Maiken Ueland. What are your thoughts?
Anthony: Call me morbid, many have. I just really enjoyed listening to the stages of decomposition.
Nadine: I could see you just having a great time over there.
Anthony: Yeah, I was loving it. Just kind of knowing like, yes, this is the bloating stage and this is the insect phase and then we get to skeletal remains. Fascinating.
And you? What was your takeaway?
Nadine: I think that, from a few of these episodes, the impact that she's making, you know, and that she can be making and helping directly with these crimes and finding these people. Like I'm just so inspired by her. And I'm so inspired by a lot of our guests who you know, have dedicated their lives to this, and have to work with some pretty tough stuff but get up and do it every day. So I'm just inspired.
Anthony: That is a much nicer sentiment than mine. Can I do a takesies backsies?
Nadine: No. You love dead bodies; you love watching them decompose.
Anthony: OK. Yep, guilty.
Nadine: I'm calling you, morbid now.
***
Nadine: So, thanks so much to Dr Maiken Ueland for a fascinating discussion. Our next episode is all about death tech, a rapidly growing field, and we'll talk to Dr Hannah Gould about life's two certainties: death and robots.
Hannah: Death and technology intersect in really different ways. It's almost on two axes. You've got death, positivity or death denial, right? You've got people who are using technology to try and build better deaths and end-of-life experiences for people. And then you've got people who are using technology to try and deny death or fight death or beat death.
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Grave Matters is an SBS podcast, written and hosted by Anthony Levin and Nadine J. Cohen and produced by Jeremy Wilmot. The SBS team is Caroline Gates, Joel Supple and Max Gosford. If you'd like to get in touch, e-mail audio@sbs.com.au.
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