Famed forensic anthropologist Dr. William Bass, whose work at the University of Tennessee and its Body Farm is one of the world's leading experts on what happens to the dead. Bass says that the practice of illegal tissue harvesting is very real and very frightening. Shortly after federal and state authorities raised questions about a tissue-harvesting operation in New York, Bass was hired by a lawyer who wanted to learn if someone's remains had been plundered for profit by the now-defunct company Biomedical Tissue Services Inc. However, the body had already been cremated.
According to Brooklyn prosecutors, Biomedical Tissue Services, from 2000 to 2005, illegally took body parts from corpses, forged clean medical histories and sold the remains for implant purposes. The operation allegedly included a secret room in a funeral home, questionable recovery teams, and clandestine surgeries to remove bones or tissue from the recently deceased.
People across the country received bone or tissue transplants traceable to Biomedical. The company is at the center of a 122-count criminal indictment and hundreds of civil cases, and at least two people from East Tennessee are undergoing retests after initial medical tests returned positive results for HIV virus.
Bass said he ended up comparing the post-cremation weight of the deceased man with data he'd collected. Bass and another UT anthropologist, Dr. Richard Jantz, went on to conduct a study of post-cremation weights using samples drawn from 306 men and women. Bass said the practice of stealing body parts for medical reasons has been around for more than a thousand years.
When anatomists first wanted to teach anatomy 1,000 to 1,200 years ago, the way they got their bodies was going to the cemetery and digging up somebody who recently died. In the early 1800s, the College of Surgeons in Edinburgh, Scotland, had so many students that officials couldn't keep up with the demand for corpses. Body snatchers realized there was money to be made through nocturnal exhumations.
The Biomedical Tissue Services fiasco is a reminder that exploiting the dead for personal gain isn't confined to the past or to fictional scenarios. (Source)
