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In our occasional Outer Limits series, we celebrate the academics who go well beyond the call of duty to carry out their research.

My colleagues and I have much enjoyed profiling the bold men and women who have lived in the most remote, uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous conditions, ventured into war zones, investigated drug gangs or back-street dog fighting. One even ended up in jail, perhaps because his work on low-cost private education in India had offended interested parties, although more likely as an attempt to ¡°shake down¡± a rich foreigner.

Not only have they all lived to tell the tale, but they have often brought back fascinating insights they simply could not have obtained otherwise.

While I certainly admire such researchers, I¡¯ll freely admit that most of them have jobs I¡¯m very glad I¡¯ve never had to do. Yet although today is Halloween, and we are all meant to be embracing our ghoulish side, it is the people I profile in next week¡¯s issue ¨C working in some of the six American ¡°body farms¡± where forensic archaeologists study the process of human decomposition ¨C whose research sounds among the most disturbing.

Yes, police investigating a murder need to ascertain time of death as accurately as possible, so it is genuinely useful to know, for example, just how quickly vultures can tear apart a corpse. But I¡¯m not sure that I would want to be the one obtaining such data, nor would I want my own body or the body of a loved one to be used as experimental material.

Fortunately, the directors of the three centres I spoke to were extremely robust in explaining the importance of their work and in confronting my own squeamishness and assumptions about ¡°natural¡± ways of treating dead bodies. So all credit to them for working on an important frontier of knowledge. But I think I¡¯ll still stick to my day job.

Read Matthew¡¯s feature on body farms