ATHENS, Ala. – High school science students across the Tennessee Valley are getting about as close as one can get to working with a real cadaver.
They call her Lady Abra Cadaver, and she’s a realistic, synthetic version of the dead human bodies used for medical research.
On loan from Athens State University, which won the cadaver in a contest from its Florida-based maker SynDaver Labs, she’s on tour with Alabama Science in Motion, visiting high schools across the region.
“It’s very real. It feels real,” said Alycia Townsend, a teacher at Athens High School where the artificial body made its first ASIM stop last week. “The things the students are getting out of this is the weight and texture and feel of an actual human, so when you take the liver out, it feels like a human liver, and you get the size and proportion of an actual human, and you can see how everything fits together.”
With plans to visit area high schools through May, ASIM brought the fake cadaver to Albert P. Brewer High School in Somerville last week, where anatomy and health-science students got to work with it.