Putting farm skills to work

A young student asks Syd Clausen if he can take a human skull to a professor's office.

Clausen, who is anatomy education coordinator at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, tells the student to keep the skull on the same floor as the lab.

“We used to let 'em take them home,” Clausen says as the student walks away. “We quit doing that, especially with Halloween coming up.”

Life meets death in the Gross Anatomy Lab, where medical and physical therapy students dissect cadavers to learn about how major organs and bones are organized in the body. This essential, hands-on work is made possible by people who sign papers before their deaths granting use of their bodies. Families also must support the decision.

“I don't want anyone operating on me who hasn't been in this room,” Clausen says. “It's research. It's education.”

Students who use the lab hold a memorial service every April and invite donors' family members. The university offers cremated remains to relatives and properly buries any ashes that are not claimed.

“They thank the people for donating,” Clausen says, with students acknowledging the opportunity to learn.

As he talks about his job, students in groups of four or five work on 55 cadavers laid out on steel tables. Computers cast images of the brain and other anatomical parts on 50-inch screens above each table.

There are strict rules of decorum — no photos, for example — but some dry humor, such as a reference to Halloween, helps students and professors work in what most people would consider an extraordinary environment.

“You gotta use humor,” Clausen says. “Not horseplay but humor.”

The embalmed bodies must be covered and kept moist between sessions. When fall classes end before Christmas break, Clausen cremates the cadavers and stores the ashes by numbers that match donors' names.

The lab is far removed from the farm in Arlington, Neb., east of Fremont, where the 62-year-old Clausen grew up and later raised corn, soybeans, alfalfa, hogs and cattle.

But he brings a farmer's talent for problem-solving to the lab. For example, he replaced 3-gallon pump cans that students used to moisten the cadavers with mobile carts holding 14-gallon commercial sprayer units. Clausen says that after six months on the job, he grew tired of filling the small cans.

The larger spray units are easier to use and more effective, he says.

He built shelves and created deflectors for light fixtures that otherwise could interfere with video screens. Clausen also handles the lab's computers and audiovisual materials and tapes demonstrations conducted by professors, posting them on the student Web site.

Clausen joined the anatomy lab staff in the mid-1990s, but he visited it years earlier when he drove a busload of Arlington High School students on a tour of the facility.

“I said, ‘Oh, who would want to work there?' Here I am, 40 years later, running the place.”

The work is rewarding, Clausen says, although he misses the great outdoors of farming.

“I like it down here, working with kids and the professors.”

Contact the writer:

444-1117, joe.ruff@owh.com