From today’s Albany Times-Union
When it comes to the body, they say you can’t take it with you when you die. But they didn’t say it should be sold from the back of a truck. Or that you should not have the right to give a fully informed consent for whatever it is that medical science wants to do with your remains.
Recently it was revealed that a group of criminals was stealing bones from bodies at crematoriums in New York.
They were then sold to for-profit tissue banks in New Jersey and Florida. Among the victims was the late host of PBS television’s Masterpiece Theater, British broadcaster and journalist Alistair Cooke. His bones were removed without his or his family’s permission or even knowledge, and then sold for thousands of dollars. What happened to Cooke has happened to others.
Investigations across the United States have revealed a gruesome market in body parts made possible by a motley collection of grim reapers who sometimes secretly and illegally and with dubious consent harvest the skin, bones, tendons, organs, and even brains of those in funeral homes, burial sites and morgues. From Maine to California to Louisiana, unscrupulous brokers are removing tissues and selling them to tissue banks which then sell them to medical schools, hospitals, research institutes and testing facilities. The trade in tissues is a half-billion dollar industry and that is enough to get some who have access to body parts to put their ethics on the shelf.
There is a long and ignoble history of pseudo-medical mutilation of bodies: William Burke and William Hare in the 19th century murdered and robbed graves to supply bodies for examination to the school of medicine in Edinburgh. A pathologist present at the Princeton, N.J., hospital where Albert Einstein died, removed Einstein’s eyes and his brain, despite his specific instructions that he be cremated. The brain went off to Philadelphia, was divided into dozens of slices and preserved; it then spent the next 40 years being lugged around …