Dealing in Death: The Lawless World of Body Brokers

Matthew Koop*

The troubled relationship between medical advancement and dead bodies dates back hundreds of years.¹ In the past, problems arose out of how difficult it was for medical institutions to obtain cadavers.² This led to school-sponsored grave robbing, and to the development of laws that automatically provided the bodies of the poor to medical schools.³ Today, the problems stem from how easy it is to get a dead body.⁴

To clarify, body donation is distinct from organ donation.⁵ Organ donation involves donating organs to be transplanted into another human.⁶ Body donation refers to the donation of a cadaver to a wide variety of medical research institutions.⁷ Due to fears of abuse and criminal activity surrounding organ donation, the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act (“UAGA”) has been adopted in some form by all fifty states.⁸ The UAGA seeks to regulate organ donation and criminalize relevant misconduct.⁹ Fears of abuse in the organ donation industry are justified.¹⁰

No federal or uniform legislation exists for body donation.¹¹ Most states have also failed to enact any notable legislation or regulations.¹² And, in the states that have acted, most of their legislation dually fails to provide the public with any meaningful transparency¹³ and the government with any serious means of enforcement.¹⁴ No national registry exists, and many brokers operate with anonymity.¹⁵ Even when authorities are made aware of problematic body brokers, there isn’t much the police can do under current law. For example, on separate occasions in 2011 and 2012, Honolulu police discovered decomposing human remains while searching a body broker’s warehouse, yet they were unable to do anything because no law had been broken.¹⁶ Existing state legislation, or the lack thereof, has failed to protect the public from a host of abuses and has left the industry largely self-regulated.¹⁷

As in the past,¹⁸ the modern body brokerage industry relies almost entirely on the disadvantaged.¹⁹ For one broker, the Biological Resource Center, “the vast majority [of donors] came from neighborhoods where the median household income fell below the state average.”²⁰ With the average funeral costing more than $8,000,²¹ those without the means for a burial may be attracted by what body brokers offer.

Body brokers advertise donation as a selfless act to advance science and medicine, as well as a cost-saving method to avoid funeral costs.²² Body brokers commonly provide free cremation of the remaining body parts (the parts they don’t end up selling) and return them to the family.²³ Sometimes, as little as a single hand is cremated.²⁴ On one occasion, the family simply received sand.²⁵

Body brokers present donors and grieving families with consent forms that fail to properly inform, or in some cases mislead those who sign the forms.²⁶ Most brokers avoid stating that body parts will be sold, or that they may turn a profit from the body.²⁷ Many also fail to clarify the extent to which the body will be dismembered or specify the purposes for which it will be used.²⁸ Even if the consent forms were transparent, approaching grieving families in the midst of grieving would still present an ethical dilemma. This is compounded by the fact that this is business for body brokers, not charity.

Body brokers claim that they get paid for their services, such as storage, transportation, sanitation, disease screening, and cutting up the bodies.²⁹ In reality, the body is the product, not the services these brokers claim to provide.³⁰ This is revealed by the fact that “[i]n bankruptcy filings, brokers have claimed body parts as assets.”³¹ Despite this, Science Care, a leader in the industry, states on its consent form, that “[h]uman tissue is intrinsically priceless and cannot be owned, bought or sold.”³² Indiana and Illinois have even granted body brokers an exemption from state sales taxes because of their arguments that they provide services, not products.³³ The testimony of Science Care executives in a trade-secrets case discredited this argument, as they stated that the price of body parts is determined by market conditions, simple supply and demand, not the work that goes into preparing the body parts.³⁴

The lack of transparency in where and to whom the donated body (or parts of the donated body) are eventually leased or sold presents another ethical dilemma.³⁵ Most people believe that the body will end up at a medical school or research institution, but those are far from the only places in which these cadavers end up. These brokers provide bodies to automobile manufacturers,³⁶ medical device developers and commercial ventures,³⁷the military,³⁸ and in one case, a body was sold to a Reuters reporter who didn’t even hide his identity.³⁹

This comes as a surprise to the families of donors.⁴⁰ In a particularly gruesome example, donated bodies were used by the U.S. Army to conduct testing on the impacts of roadside bombs.⁴¹ This occurred despite the fact that many of the families explicitly disallowed the bodies to be used for violent experiments on their consent forms.⁴² Families often believe that the body of their loved one has been donated for the benefit of the masses. In many cases, however, their body is donated to a for-profit body broker, who then sells it to a for-profit company, who uses the body to develop products which they will privately own and sell.⁴³ In situations like these, bodies are potentially being donated for purposes and uses which would have been rejected if they were properly disclosed. A person’s body could be used to further an industry or trade which while living, that body abhorred.

There is also no guarantee that a body will be treated with dignity between the donation of the body, and its eventual sale.⁴⁴ A ripe example of this can be seen in the case of Arthur Rathburn.⁴⁵ Rathburn dismembered his bodies with chainsaws and other tools that favored efficiency over care. His indictment also alleges that he sold bodies that were infected with HIV and Hepatitis B, endangering those who purchased the bodies.⁴⁶ However, Rathburn’s indictment should not be misconstrued as evidence that authorities are actively pursuing problems in this industry. It took authorities years of suspicious encounters with Rathburn to finally charge him in 2016.⁴⁷ As early as 2004, authorities discovered that Rathburn could not provide any documentation that showed the bodies in his warehouse were even donated.⁴⁸ In 2011, Rathburn was questioned at the airport, carrying picnic coolers containing eight heads floating in an unknown liquid.⁴⁹ At another broker, Biological Resource Center, an untrained college intern, who was studying nutrition, described spending her summer removing fingernails, cutting off hands, and decapitating cadavers with saws.⁵⁰ In her senior thesis, she wrote “[n]ot once did I receive formal training or education.”⁵¹ The lack of nation-wide regulations to ensure that donated bodies are treated sanitarily, or with dignity, creates public safety and ethical issues.

The problems of the body brokering industry are abundant and obvious. Thankfully, in 2023, legislation was introduced that would help regulate the industry.⁵² The bipartisan Consensual Donation and Research Integrity Act would require brokers to register with the Department of Health and Human Services, and would regulate record-keeping, labeling, packaging, and the storage of bodies.⁵³ The passage of this Act would help protect families, honor the wishes of the dead, and hopefully provide the necessary fencing to keep bad actors out of the body brokering industry.

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* Matthew Koop, J.D. Candidate, University of St. Thomas School of Law Class of 2025 (Associate Editor).

1. Antero Pietila, In Need of Cadavers, 19th-Century Medical Students Raided Baltimore’s Graves, Smithsonian Mag. (Oct. 25, 2018), https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/in-need-cadavers-19th-century-medical-students-raided-baltimores-graves-180970629/. ↩︎
2. Sam Kean, The Anatomy Riot of 1788, Science Hist. Inst. (Feb. 4, 2020), https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/the-anatomy-riot-of-1788/. ↩︎
3. Id. ↩︎
4. Brian Grow & John Shiffman, In the U.S. Market for Human Bodies, Almost Anyone Can Dissect and Sell the Dead, Reuters (Oct. 24, 2017, 11:00 AM GMT), https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-bodies-brokers/. ↩︎
5. FAQ: How Are Organ Donation and Body Donation Different?, Medcure (June 25, 2019), https://medcure.org/faq-how-are-organ-donation-and-body-donation-different/. ↩︎
6. Id. ↩︎
7. Id. ↩︎
8. Anatomical Gift Act, Unif. L. Comm’n, https://www.uniformlaws.org/committees/community-home?CommunityKey=015e18ad-4806-4dff-b011-8e1ebc0d1d0f (last visited Mar. 20, 2024). ↩︎
9. Id. ↩︎
10. See Issue Brief, The Inter-Agency Coordination Grp. Against Trafficking in Persons, Issue Brief 11/2021. ↩︎
11. Grow & Shiffman, supra note 5. ↩︎
12. Id. ↩︎
13. Id. ↩︎
14. Id. ↩︎
15. Id. ↩︎
16. Id. ↩︎
17. John Shiffman & Brian Grow, In a Warehouse of Horrors, Body Broker Allegedly Kept Human Heads Stacked on His Shelves, Reuters (Oct. 31, 2017, 11:00 AM GMT), https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-bodies-rathburn/. ↩︎
18. Kean, supra note 3. ↩︎
19. John Shiffman, Reade Levinson & Brian Grow, A Business where Human Bodies were Butchered, Packaged and Sold, Reuters (Dec. 27, 2017, 1:00 PM GMT), https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-bodies-business/. ↩︎
20. Id. ↩︎
21. Erica Lamberg, How Much Does the Average Funeral Cost?, Time (updated Feb. 29, 2024), https://time.com/personal-finance/article/how-much-does-the-average-funeral-cost/. ↩︎
22. Grow & Shiffman, supra note 5. ↩︎
23. Id. ↩︎
24. Id. ↩︎
25. Id. ↩︎
26. Id. ↩︎
27. Brian Grow & John Shiffman, A Reuters Journalist Bought Human Body parts, then Learned a Donor’s Heart-Wrenching Story, Reuters (Oct. 25, 2017, 11:00 AM GMT), https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-bodies-cody/. ↩︎
28. Id. ↩︎
29. John Shiffman & Brian Grow, How an American Company Made a Fortune Selling Bodies Donated to Science, Reuters (Oct. 26, 2017, 11:00 AM GMT), https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-bodies-science/. ↩︎
30. Id. ↩︎
31. Grow & Shiffman, supra note 5. ↩︎
32. Shiffman & Grow, supra note 28. ↩︎
33. Id. ↩︎
34. Id. ↩︎
35. See Grow & Shiffman, supra note 5; John Shiffman, How the Body of an Arizona Great-Grandmother Ended Up as Part of a U.S. Army Blast Test, Reuters (Dec. 23, 2016, 2 PM GMT), https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-bodybrokers-industry/. ↩︎
36. Id. ↩︎
37. Id. ↩︎
38. Id. ↩︎
39. Grow & Shiffman, supra note 5. ↩︎
40. Grow & Shiffman, supra note 28. ↩︎
41. Shiffman, supra note 33. ↩︎
42. Id. ↩︎
43. See id. ↩︎
44. Shiffman & Grow, supra note 5. ↩︎
45. Id. ↩︎
46. Id. ↩︎
47. Id. ↩︎
48. Id. ↩︎
49. Id. ↩︎
50. Shiffman, Levinson & Grow, supra note 20. ↩︎
51. Id. ↩︎
52. Consensual Donation and Research Integrity Act of 2023, H.R. 4275, 118th Cong. (2023). ↩︎
53. Id. ↩︎