William M. Bass QUOTES

1 " We’re organisms; we’re conceived, we’re born, we live, we die, and we decay. But as we decay we feed the world of the living: plants and bugs and bacteria. "

― William M. Bass , Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales

2 " I'm sure the makers of Downy would be pleased to know that their product makes even mummified human skin soft and fragrant. "

― William M. Bass , Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales

3 " All my life I'd been a believing Christian. ... But that instant in the ER--the instant Annette [his wife] died--I seemed to feel my religious faith die, too.

As I thought more about it in the bleak days and weeks that followed, I decided the Bible had gotten it exactly backward. Maybe God hadn't created us in His image; maybe we'd created god in our image. "

― William M. Bass

4 " Some scientists thrive on the conceptual; their minds can envision particles that the most powerful microscopes can’t show us; processes that can’t be directly observed, but only inferred, guessed at, by interpreting a stew of complex biochemical by-products. I am not one of these scientists; I need bones and teeth, things I can see with my eyes and grasp with my hands. Jason Eshleman, on the other hand, can see with his mind’s eye, grasping the complex interactions of the most complex molecules in the body, DNA. "

― William M. Bass , Beyond the Body Farm: A Legendary Bone Detective Explores Murders, Mysteries, and the Revolution in Forensic Science

5 " Polio has been virtually forgotten by now, but in the first half of the twentieth century, it was a plague of almost biblical proportions. Tens of thousands of innocent children and young adults were killed, crippled, or paralyzed. Polio, a powerful form of viral meningitis, cut a wide and ruthless swath through an entire generation of Americans. Carol "

― William M. Bass , Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales

6 " And at that pivotal moment, the University of Tennessee came calling. So did forensic anthropology. My career as “Indian grave-robber number one” was over. My true vocation—as a forensic scientist—was about to begin. "

― William M. Bass , Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales

7 " By now it was nearly noon and I was hungry, so we made a quick run to Mr. Burger, a tiny carryout place a mile down the road, and wolfed down lunch standing outside the cemetery shop. We positioned ourselves upwind from the coffin, but occasionally the wind would shift and the aroma of burgers would mingle with the aroma of the Bopper. "

― William M. Bass , Beyond the Body Farm: A Legendary Bone Detective Explores Murders, Mysteries, and the Revolution in Forensic Science

8 " surprisingly dramatic glow some minerals gave off when illuminated with ultraviolet light, or “black light.” In daylight, for instance, the mineral fluorite is a drab, chalky color; in a dark room under UV light, though, fluorite glows a brilliant blue; the mineral calcite shines bright red; and aragonite gives off a neon green. If you’ve ever stepped into a teenager’s cavelike room decorated with black-light posters (less common now than they were in the 1970s, when my three sons were growing up), you’ve seen another version of UV fluorescence in action. "

― William M. Bass , Beyond the Body Farm: A Legendary Bone Detective Explores Murders, Mysteries, and the Revolution in Forensic Science

9 " Most fans of forensic books and television shows are aware that the biochemical building blocks of DNA can be assembled in many billions of different ways, ensuring that no two people—except for identical twins—will possess the same genetic “fingerprint.” Not many of those same people realize that there are likewise billions of possible combinations of tooth shapes, sizes, orientations, and anomalies, including cavities, fillings, chips, and distinctively shaped roots. Although identical twins can’t be distinguished from one another by their DNA, they can be told apart by their teeth. "

― William M. Bass , Beyond the Body Farm: A Legendary Bone Detective Explores Murders, Mysteries, and the Revolution in Forensic Science

10 " (There are two kinds of observers in science: splitters and lumpers. I’ve never been much of a splitter; in my heart of hearts, I’m a lumper.) In "

― William M. Bass , Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales

11 " When the Corps of Discovery dropped anchor at a Mandan village in 1804, they were met by blond-haired, blue-eyed Mandans—the offspring of native women and French explorers or trappers. On "

― William M. Bass , Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales

12 " Six miles upstream of Pierre (pronounced “pee-AIR” by the French but “peer” by South Dakotans), they began piling up a ridge of earth nearly 250 feet high and almost two miles long. The Oahe Dam, named for a Sioux council lodge, was the largest earth-fill dam in the United States when it was begun in 1948. It still is. The "

― William M. Bass , Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales

13 " Every one of these lessons would serve me well in the years ahead as I began applying the secrets I learned from the long-dead to understanding the stories of the recently murdered. BY "

― William M. Bass , Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales

14 " It’s hot as blazes in South Dakota in August, and the prairie is a mighty big place to search. To do the job swiftly, we’d need a small army of workers. What we had, it turns out, was a very large army of very small workers: the ants burrowing into the prairie by the billions. The "

― William M. Bass , Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales

15 " The prairie is notorious for the suddenness and violence of its weather changes, and that’s especially true in summer. All that grass gives off a tremendous amount of moisture. As the sun beats down, the water vapor rises until it condenses, sometimes as puffy, cotton-candy clouds, and sometimes as black thunderheads towering four miles high. Four "

― William M. Bass , Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales

16 " It was there that Lewis and Clark encountered and scrapped with the Arikara. It was there that unscrupulous agents of fur companies waged biological warfare on them, bringing blankets from Saint Louis—blankets deliberately contaminated with smallpox, to which the Indians’ unsuspecting immune systems fell easy prey. And it was there, on August 9, 1823, that Colonel Henry Leavenworth and a force of nearly three hundred U.S. Army soldiers, Missouri militiamen, and Sioux warriors attacked the villages with rifles, bows, clubs, and gunboats. During the night of August 14, the remaining Arikara slipped away from their battered villages. BY "

― William M. Bass , Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales

17 " Second, I was helping the modern Sioux settle their score with the ancient Arikara: helping them “count final coup,” as they call it. But "

― William M. Bass , Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales

18 " Flesh decays; bone endures. Flesh forgets and forgives ancient injuries; bone heals, but it always remembers: a childhood fall, a barroom brawl; the smash of a pistol butt to the temple, the quick sting of a blade between the ribs. The bones capture such moments, preserve a record of them, and reveal them to anyone with eyes trained to see the rich visual record, to hear the faint whispers rising from the dead. I "

― William M. Bass , Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales

19 " If possible, you also want to determine the cause of death (technically, only medical examiners can determine cause of death; we anthropologists call things like stab wounds and gunshots “manner of death”). But "

― William M. Bass , Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales

20 " But before you can tell who someone was and how they died—and you won’t always be able to tell—you start with the Big Four: sex, race, age, and stature. Whenever "

― William M. Bass , Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales

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