Jon Oliver did a piece on body donation[0]. Many people probably wouldn't expect their loved ones body to be used for entertainment in a hotel, sold piece by piece for profit or used to test explosives.
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