A search of 'alternatives to cremation and burial' led me to the website of Biopresence, an 'art venture' concept by U.K and Japanese artists/scientists Shiho Fukuhara and Georg Tremmel. Biopresence makes 'Human DNA Trees' as 'living memorials' or 'transgenic tombstones'. In short they "introduce human characteristics into a plant, without changing the genes of the resulting plant." My first thought was...
Basically through some sciencey mambo jumbo that can be best explained with: Agrobacterium tumefaciens, blah blah blah, crown-galls, yadda yadda yadda, DNA manifold, transhuman-plant gene, and so on and so forth, you get a tree that has some human stuff in it. The Biopresence website, which seems to be under construction and doesn't give any information about how you can go about procuring your transgenic tombstone or how much it will cost (a lot, I bet), explains the process with the following useful diagram:
Ooooookay it all makes perfect sense to me now.
So what do you get when all is said and done? A tree that looks and acts exactly like every single other tree out there. What. A. Concept. The one question on my mind is: why? Whatever happened to being satisfied with planting a normal, Home Depot variety willow to memorialize your loved one symbolically?
I suppose there would be some value here to archaeologists in that maybe they could see whose families were the types to get them made into trees. Then perhaps you could date the approximate time of death based on the tree rings. You could also say something about areas where there are high numbers of these trees. I don't think you could make many other conclusions about an individual based on this type of memorial since there would be no body, coffin, grave goods, etc.
OMG, I just had a thought! What if you made your deceased into a fruit tree, would that be freaky or what? Then if you were a crazy lady you might start selling your late husband's apples at the farmer's market or something and nobody would know.
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