Harvesting Cadavers for Medical Research

March 9, 2006 — -- The accusations against Michael Mastromarino and Biomedical Tissue Services -- charged with illegally taking body parts from funeral homes and selling the tissue for big profits -- are frightening.

The case begs the question: Could illegal tissue harvesting be going on elsewhere?

"I liken this to the tip of the iceberg," said Todd Olson, who teaches anatomy at Albert Einstein Medical School and heads up its anatomical donations program. "The issues now that we are seeing with biomedical tissue services and the tissue industry is but another reflection of the fact that your body is now worth more dead than for most people it is alive."

There is another piece of the body parts trade that has even less regulation than tissue transplant: medical seminars, a vital part of a doctor's continuing education. Without these seminars, surgeons would be trying out new techniques on live patients.

But many say there isn't enough oversight in that field -- it's a world where a box of human elbows can be shipped by express mail.

And it's a business that seems to require little overhead or qualifications, said author Annie Cheney.

"All you need, really, uh, is a couple of meat freezers, and some saws, and a warehouse," said Cheney.

It's not hard to find other instances of bodies being illegally harvested for tissue. In Riverside, Calif., a crematorium owner had allegedly been taking his customers' bodies without consent, cutting them up and selling them -- not for transplant, but to shady body brokers for medical research.

Prosecutor Victoria Hightower was there when the police raided the Pacific Crematorium. "It was ... it's unspeakable, really. I mean to see something like that. To see severed heads wrapped in Saran Wrap and in refrigerators," she said.

But even when medical seminars are being supplied by responsible companies who gain consent of next of kin, concerns have been raised about the locations of some of the seminars. Many of the seminars take place in some of the most well-known hotels in the country.