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Pentagon Explodes Real Human Cadavers to Measure Damage Caused by Roadside Bombs
According to Reuters, SURPRISE, Arizona – Jim Stauffer thought he was doing the right thing.
He had cared for his elderly mother, Doris, throughout her harrowing descent into dementia. In 2013, when she passed away at age 74, he decided to donate her brain to science. He hoped the gift might aid the search for a cure to Alzheimer’s disease.
At a nurse’s suggestion, the family contacted Biological Resource Center, a local company that brokered the donation of human bodies for research. Within the hour, BRC dispatched a driver to collect Doris. Jim Stauffer signed a form authorizing medical research on his mother’s body. He also checked a box prohibiting military, traffic-safety and other non-medical experiments.
Ten days later, Jim received his mother’s cremated remains. He wasn’t told how her body had been used.
Records reviewed by Reuters show that BRC workers detached one of Doris Stauffer’s hands for cremation. After sending those ashes back to her son, the company sold and shipped the rest of Stauffer’s body to a taxpayer-funded research project for the U.S. Army.
Her brain never was used for Alzheimer’s research. Instead, Stauffer’s body became part of an Army experiment to measure damage caused by roadside bombs.
Internal BRC and military records show that at least 20 other bodies were also used in the blast experiments without permission of the donors or their relatives, a violation of U.S. Army policy. BRC sold donated bodies like Stauffer’s for $5,893 each.
Army officials involved in the project said they never received the consent forms that donors or their families had signed. Rather, the officials said they relied on assurances from BRC that families had agreed to let the bodies be used in such experiments.
BRC, which sold more than 20,000 parts from some 5,000 human bodies over a decade, is no longer in business. Its former owner, Stephen Gore, pleaded guilty to fraud last year. In a statement to Reuters, Gore said that he always tried to honor the wishes of donors and sent consent forms when researchers requested them.
Jim Stauffer learned of his mother’s fate not from BRC or the Army but from a Reuters reporter. When told, Stauffer curled his lip in anger and clutched his wife Lisa’s arm.
“We did right,” Lisa reassured him. “They just did not honor our wishes.”
SCANT OVERSIGHT
The story of how an Arizona grandmother’s remains came to be used in a Pentagon experiment shines a spotlight on a growing but little-known industry: the trade in human cadavers and body parts.
The body-brokering business is distinct from organ transplantation, in which hearts, livers, eyes and lungs are carefully removed from the dead to extend or enrich the lives of the living. It also is separate from the business of using skin, tendon or bone from cadavers to repair joints or other parts of the body. Those practices are strictly regulated by U.S. law. In contrast, the buying and selling of human bodies not used for transplant receives scant oversight.
No federal law regulates body brokers like BRC, and no U.S. government agency monitors what happens to cadavers pledged for use in medical education and research.
“It is not illegal to sell a whole body or the parts of a body for research or education,” said University of Iowa law professor Sheldon F. Kurtz, who helped modify the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, which has been adopted by 46 states. Although the act was updated in 2006, Kurtz said, “the issue of whole bodies or body parts for research or education never came up during our discussions.”
Since then, the body trade has become big business. Only one state, New York, keeps detailed records on the industry. According to the most recent data available, companies that did business in New York shipped at least 100,000 body parts across the country from 2011 to 2014. Reuters obtained the data, which have never been made public, from the state’s health department.
The New York figures represent a fraction of the industry: Any company that handles bodies but doesn’t do business in New York state is not included. A handful of other states either require companies to register with state health departments or seek approval to ship individual body parts across state lines. Most states compile no such records.
“We are in a complete vacuum,” said Michel Anteby, a Boston University business professor who has researched the trade in bodies. “That’s a real problem because we are treating bodies as a potential commodity like any other.”
Brokers procure virtually all their cadavers for free from donors who believe the remains will be used for science. As a result, brokers can turn a profit of thousands of dollars on each body donated. “It’s about $2,500 to $3,000,” said John Cover, chief operating officer of Research for Life, a body broker based in Phoenix.
When bodies are subsequently dismembered and sold part by part, the profit margin can be even higher. BRC charged $5,893 for a whole body in 2013; a few years earlier, the company priced spines at $1,900, legs at $1,300 each, and torsos at $3,500, BRC documents show.
Cadavers and donated body parts provide vital tools to teach anatomy and medical students. They also serve as a cornerstone of the medical-device business. Artificial hips, dental crowns and surgical devices are best tested on real human tissue. Surgeons and dentists who implant the devices and use new tools have to be trained.
“There’s no way any medical institution could function without the donation of cadavers,” said David Morton, a University of Utah School of Medicine professor and a board member of the American Association of Anatomists.
Most medical schools have strict rules for handling bodies, Morton said. Those quality controls and ethical guidelines, however, aren’t always followed. This year, The New York Times reported that New York University buried an unknown number of donated bodies in mass graves. The school apologized and said it had changed its policy in 2013 to better protect donor wishes.
The BRC case is not the first time bodies donated to medical schools have been misused in military experiments. In 2004, Tulane University disclosed that bodies donated to the school were shipped to a broker who then provided them to the Army, which used them for landmine experiments. As happened with BRC, these donors had not consented to military use.
