Senate PSA: Do NOT donate your body to "science"

I don't know about in other countries, but in the US this is a for profit industry. You donate your loved ones' body and a broker gets to sell it or it's pieces for profit.

There is almost never an assurance that such donations actually go to the scientific cause you'd like it to. In fact usually the bodies are cut up and like parts kept together and often sold in bulk to the highest bidder.

Also what counts as science for these brokers is very loose..one family was horrified to find their grandmother's body was not used for medical research, but was instead blown up by the military to test munitions.

This was a rabbit hole I went down a few years ago, reading about this industry and these stories. Here's just one of them.

https://time.com/5636486/fbi-body-donation-arizona/

Anyway, be an organ donor if you want to help others. But specify live donors, not donation to "scientific research". I just did this with my state.

 

How do you sell a dead body for profit? What value is there in it, if not for getting usable organs?

 

That’s an incredibly shocking article, particularly the “morbid joke” that was carried out by the workers. I wouldn’t treat a dead animal the way these people treat human remains. When I die, doctors can take whatever organs are still of any use for transplant, but the rest of me is going into the ground.

 

I'm going to be honest, this is the only part that makes me angry. Give my family their cut you suspiciously literal given this is a metaphor vultures.

 

Somehow, society gets weirder about someone (or their beneficiaries) getting financial gain from body parts being sold than various corporations getting financial gain.

 

Everything is for sale, I suppose

Here, donation of one's corpse for science can only be made to a specific list of universities (27 in total). A small fee (in the low hundred Euros) is generally asked for, essentially for processing the demands. Inhumation or cremation of a body donated for science is paid for by the establishment that received the donation.

No private actors are entitled to receiving a corpse donated for science, it is entirely illegal here. Donations for science cross into experimentation with private actors under very specific circumstances, like experimentation undertaken for the purpose of determining legal security norms.

 

In Austria when you agree to donate your body to science it is usually used for medical reasons/researches (University). I think in some cases they use it for accident research. The number of institutions allowed to receive bodies is limited.
Afterwards the body gets burned and buried in an honor grave of the science institute.
E.g. the mom of a friend of mine died on a very rare specific cancer. She donated her body to science and after her death her body was forwarded to the medical institute that treated her.

For organ donation it is different. You explicitly need to disagree. Otherwise you might get cannibalized like an old car.

 

Well, you’re probably not being cannibalized per se.

 

Soylent Green - it's people, and it's yummy!

 

Recycled sounds better than cannibalized indeed.

- Did you like the President?
- I sure did.
- Then have a second helping.

 

These brokers also come into hospitals and prey on families whose loved ones are about to die..and no, the family doesn't get the money. It's gross.

 

Woo boy, i knew this day would come. I worked for their competitor, straight out of college. The FBI raided that place because the owner of the lab i worked in acted nice and like they were friendly companies. He toured their facility a few times, noted down **** and then called the FBI to eliminate competition. Ruthless *******

Ive got some horror stories from that place, gorier than any horror slasher you could imagine.

I had to teach the lab supervisor (who had been there since it opened) where certain tissues are for collection because they had been gathering it from wrong body areas. He subsequently fired me and told me i don't deserve to work in healthcare in any way and i didn’t know what i was doing (he was collecting pituitary tissue from the abdomen guys like come the ****on).

He had a BS in business...

The owner has no post high school education, managerial staff are all his kids (most of whom didn’t finish high school either and all of them smoked while working in the sterile operating room.) The family was highly religious and i was told by former coworkers I was actually fired for being jewish.

That was kind of a ramble on- anyway after i worked there and saw what we did (we were told all tissue/organ collections went to med schools or training for research facilities- like if you had stomach cancer for example but looking back it probably isn’t legitimate) i took myself off of organ donation lists.

I just want to be cremated and planted as a tree for the wife now. Many decades in the future.

To be fair- I loved the work. It was laid back and I could use my surgical tech degree daily without the stressors of an OR, but looking back it was probably really under the table and i was really naive.

Edit: What SJ said above is definitely true. In addition, most families PAY to have their deceased family members as part of these programs. Anything not used or useful is cremated and returned to family or given a burial at sea on a ship (they take hundreds of cremations and scatter them in the ocean).

 

Nah, recycled does not sound dramatic enough.

 

Okay, but whereas cannibalizing is something you can only metaphorically do to a car there's a rather specific literal meaning once you're talking about a corpse that I think is several degrees more extreme than "having organs reused to save lives."

 

I love language.

 

I'm just saying if you're going to cannibalize my remains, do not leave the organs intact for future reuse. Make a sausage or something.

 

I'll probably follow Rodney Dangerfield's advice and donate my body to science fiction.

 

I wish to be shot out of a cannon through the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and into the Mississippi River.

 

Wow didn't realize we had someone here who had worked in one of these places. What you described jives with all the reporting I've read, that these people also don't have any specific training or licensing.. it's a mess.

 

Prop me up beside the jukebox when I die.

 

I'll need a couple of you mother****ers to Weekend at Bernie's me.

 

I feel like this should be in a movie.