Harvard morgue theft ring stole body parts, sold brains, flesh->leather (2023)
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
But this kind of ghoulishness for petty profit is extremely discouraging. I'm happy to contribute to the next generation of learning and science. But if my parts are going to wind up traded & sold by a bunch of scumbags, I'd literally prefer to just get placed in the remote woods for animals to eat - go straight back to the natural cycle.
So, it seems that before donating, we now must ask what controls are in place. Ugh.
But letting your body rot in the woods doesn’t really scale. Yeah a sky burial works for a small mountain village, but you would have to dedicate huge swathes of land and sustain a large carrion bird population to do that for a city without it turning into a biohazard.
There is a reason most cultures prefer to bury or burn their dead.
Wishing you a very long, very healthy, very happy, very peaceful life. May we all rest in peace eventually.
If one of my loved ones decided to donate their body to science, and their skull ended up being sold to some creep who got off on having a human skull, I'd be pretty irate.
Initially I was thinking this was a organ transplant ring or something, but these are bones and teeth, etc.
Do people really just collect human remains as art? I thought taxidermy of animals was strange, but this seems even stranger.
https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/fbi-search-kats-creepy-c...
There are nondestructive low cost tests to easily verify human remains that unscrupulous collectors can use but determining how old those remains are is much harder, more expensive, and generally opens up the collector to outside scrutiny. That makes scamming such collectors a lot easier as long as you've got a reliable source of human remains.
I imagine there are also some people with tastes, culinary or sexual, that others would find abhorrent.
Mental issues and stupid rituals should be very marginal cases.
to feel like they have power over others. they know the decedent did not authorize their skull to be (say) mounted on a cane next to their throne, or their teeth to be made into (say) a necklace. I can see how there could be a market for products that say "look how badass I am, that I have human remains over my doorway", just like some people do with their (egregiously) lifted trucks, or other status symbols.
What happens when you donate your body to science – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33206364
But it turns out that it's illegal to remove parts from a human body in the US. So you'd either have to make a backroom deal or arrange to transport your remains to another country and then ship them back. Lame.
This is not true, it's just a highly regulated market. Look up tissue banks.
This is why it is customary to inter bodily remains in public places such as cemeteries, where they are open and may be visited by anyone with an interest, or indeed any stranger who wishes to pay respects and keep your memory alive.
Case in point: my godfather/uncle passed away a few years ago, and I missed his funeral because I was unable to travel. The word is that he was cremated, and those remains are kept in the home of my estranged cousin. Therefore, even if I were to travel there, I cannot rightly invite myself to her home to visit the remains of my uncle. It is unjust that they are more or less "held hostage" and that she claims "ownership" of his body, thereby withholding rights of visitation and veneration from the rest of the family, or at least unjustly gatekeeping those rights.
Veneration is enormously culturally subjective. There are many, many, many cultures that would have seen placing the skull of an ancestor in a prominent place as a very, very, very obvious sign of respect and power.
But, my people don't engage in ancestor worship. I come from sad stock and I'd rather be forgotten after I die.
But the context of this thread involves rather obscure and private locales, such as a bookshelf in Chad's garage, or an incel's 1BR apartment. The foot traffic and availability would be near-zero.
I'm not sure how you leapt from that context to "a prominent place".
Compare this to the custom of churches holding relics for public veneration, such as embedding them in an altar, displaying them at a shrine, or in a reliquary held by a priest for people to line up and kiss. Or the standard custom of cemeteries and mausoleums which are open to the public at all times of the year, which offer sacred consecrated ground, and religious/spiritual context for those who venerate the remains.
I handled the final affairs for a family member who wished to be donated to science. This family member died unexpectedly and many decades before you’d expect people to make advance and specific arrangements for anatomical donation.
So we got to work. We engaged with what we learned was an outfit based in California that was not up front that they would part out your deceased loved one to researchers who require specific organs for research.
Our second attempt was a university that runs a “body farm” which was actually the specific wish of the deceased, and so we were able to make that happen in short order, which we didn’t expect.
It taught me to only trust universities with this sort of thing.
What do you make of TFA in this case? Does it erode that trust or would you go the same route again?
The university we worked with is a known pioneer in a particular field of decomposition study with a small number of donors per year. For this institute specifically there just isn’t room for shenanigans.
Generally though, the difference in process, licensing paperwork (for the specific donation), the nature of the conversations you have with the employees involved, was all very different between the universities and profit based anatomical donation outfits. The ones that weren’t affiliated with a university felt extremely transactional and not really concerned with your concerns.
Edit: typo
It's not always animal bone . . .
Using dozens of contemporary written accounts in Belgian, German and French archives, three researchers including our Archaeological Director Professor Tony Pollard have come to the conclusion that bones of the Waterloo dead were plundered from 1834 onwards, and used in the process of refining sugar in Belgian sugar mills.
IMHO, the fact that this bizarre failure of integrity can happen, around cadavers donated to students/research, at one of the most prestigious institutions.... makes me wonder about the related opt-in of being an organ donor.
(Example: If I'm recovering nicely in the hospital, then someone crashes their Lamborghini, and they urgently need a replacement vital organ, does being a conveniently-located registered organ donor, with healthy low-vice giblets... mean that I have to be concerned about hospital administrators with syringes.)