The body donation industry is unregulated. There was a whole series of articles about it. They use deliberately misleading language in their contracts so that most people have no idea that their loved one's body may be sold to the military. It's really messed up.
The guy in this story specifically marked "No" when asked to consent to military testing and the company sold her body anyway. He, along with other families, sued and won $58 million.
Well, thatâs if they ever get the money. The person they sued and won against had no assets, so itâs gone to the insurance company. The insurance company couldâve settled for 1.6 million (the maximum payout) and they actually declined, stating they werenât liable for a dime. This actually happens all the time, the vast majority of companies in the world will just fold rather than pay $58 million. The vast majority of the time these class actions end with nickels on the dollar, if anything at allâŠ
Correct. My dad was tasked to remodel some apartments with lead paint that the landlord company didn't tell him about nor issued remotely adequate PPE's, and
(1) there was mandatory arbitration clause i.e. matter had to go in front of some retired judge on THEIR payroll not a court, and
(2) the LLC company giving the work was a legally separate entity from the one collecting rent which too was separate from one owning the real estate. I.e. there was a complex corporate structure set up that was costly to pierce, designed specifically so they could just bankrupt and sever the LLC "tentacle" that was being sued without touching the capital or revenue stream.
I watched the series Leverage: Redemption and in one of the episodes, they try to trap a judge for bribery and apparently itâs very difficult to commit a crime of bribery as a sitting judge because of all the loopholes. Itâs messed up
I mean, tbh, if I was the grandma, I wouldn't even be angry. I brought them a buch of cash, got some assholes sued and it sure is a crazier way to end than getting thrown in a hole and covered in dirt
I mean lowkey, now the the thoughts in my head, having my corpse used in an explosive test get sploded to smithereens does sound slightly intriguing to me, then again, by then I could maybe convince someone to do that without the military involved somehow
What really sucked in this case was that there was something unique about grannies Alzheimer's. I can't find it anymore, but iirk, she developed the disease in a novel way with no previous risk factors and no common genetic markers, so the son donated the body so her dementia could be studied. The body broker violated the terms of the donation, the body was blown up, and the brain was lost to science.
It was $58M divided among 10 families not including legal fees (which can be up to 40%). Families would be lucky to clear $3 million each. Certainly itâs some justice for what they went through but hardly generational wealth.
Can sorta answer that. Worked as a military medical instructor. When we conducted tissue training using cadavers, the basic expectation is that after training is complete, we needed to attempt to âreturn it intact â I.e if a limb was removed to simulate amputation, sew it back on. Canât speak for if this is the case for explosives testing, but if it wasâŠ.dude, thatâs atrocious and someone shoulda gotten charged/ass beat.
Omg I read the article and when they raided the body donation company, they found a torso where the original head was removed and a smaller head was sewn on. What the heck was happening at the facility??
This reminds me of the slew of funeral homes that subcontracted for body storage without actually vetting any of the subcontractors and a lot of those contractors literally just stuffed corpses in ice chests and refrigerators in their homes.
And also that one coroner who was caught randomly disposing of womens body parts in the woods somewhat wrapped in gauze, also having a large refrigerated connex box on his property that was IIRC empty when they finally got a warrant for his home.
Only 58 million? A single F-35 costs over 100 million, they felt fucking nothing and continue to wrongly use donated bodies. It's just a small business expense that normal Americans pay
The fact the bodies are even SOLD should be hella illegal⊠itâs on par with selling illegally harvested organs⊠itâs just pure unfettered unethical capitalist greed, mixed with the MIC⊠in that case.
Mary Roach has a novel about human cadavers and it is fascinating. One of the take aways is the fact and law in the US that "you can donate your body to science, but you cannot dictate what is done with it".
Stiff! It's so good! My least favorite part was learning that when a cadaver's stomach rips open due to a buildup of gasses it sounds like a bowl of rice krispies.
There were many parts of that book where I kept saying ewww out loud, but kept reading haha. It really is a fascinating book.
I really liked the mortician chapter. I learned a lot! I thought the crash test bodies were interesting as well. Honestly each chapter kept me highly interested and disgusted at the same time.
If it was donated to the military, sure. I agree that they could use the body however they wanted for research, but they SOLD the body and made profits. If it was my loved one, it wouldn't be about the bomb test, it them was selling it. Also, they donated it for alzheimer's research, not bomb research.
There's a lot of demand for dead bodies. It's a fairly taboo subject but the reality is there's lots of research that is slow or impossible because it's not easy (or cheap) to obtain human bodies to work with.
And sometimes those bodies get blown up in a chair instead lol
Trans community owes those who donated their bodies a lot, they've been used to perfect techniques for gender-affirming surgery (like vaginoplasties), although reading this thread, I am unsure if the donors knew that was the destiny of their body, or had control over that aspect. Still mad props for just letting go like that to help people and let anything be done with what was left behind.
no, you have no idea what gets done with your body after donation. I'm curious how these families found out the research place sold those specific bodies to the military, much less the fates of each specific body (grandma strapped to a chair and blown up).
What's insane to me that (where I live) I need pay for donating my body. Like wtf. I don't want a burial and that dor thousands of dollars, why the fuck does it cost money to donate my own body.
I think you guys invented it, when the medical colleges got going and there wasn't a legitimate source for bodies. Michelangelo knew some body brokers: he did a bunch of dissections that were probably illegal/unapproved by the monastery hospital he got them from.
This is a common myth, but basically everybody around him knew what Michaelangelo was doing with the dissections. It might not have been the most ethical part of his work but his patrons, the church, and peers were all totally fine with it. At one point he got the bodies through the church, in exchange for building them a new crucifix. It was definitely approved of by the monastery.
I went to Italy recently and our guides specifically told us Michaelangelo got the bodies legitimately in at least three places, the Vatican museums, the academia where David is, and the church where his tomb is.
Interesting. I guess it depends on who needs to give permission for it to be OK. It seems like a lot of people would get upset if their family members' bodies were used for that purpose (even now).
Thanks for the details, I can see how the myth grew: "bodysnatching Michelangelo" is a more exciting story than "the hospital knew about it and his sketches actually helped advance medical science eventually"
I'm sure the practice exists in the EU, too. Though way more regulated. Some organization has to manage and transport of the bodies and connect bodies to organizations that need them.
I find it weird but at the same time my mother wanted to donate her body and they wouldnât take it because she had an autopsy- itâs actually a bit hard to donate your corpse in the U.K. and my partner would love to be blown up experimentally.
3 days late but this happens quite a bit in Europe too. The Body Worlds exhibit is the big one I remember, with their wikipedia outlining a body broker scandal in 2004, but there are more recent articles with the latest (as far as i remember) being 2022?
Body Worlds itself even sells their own plastinated corpses on the founderâs website to this day. Real corpses of actual people are listed as products. Itâs a terrible business.
It's not just the military. They can sell it to anyone. There was a guy I read about who purchased a body which was donated to "science" and he used it for a theater project instead.
The body donation industry is unregulated. There was a whole series of articles about it.
It's not unregulated, it's underregulated. Which may feel like the same thing, "you can do whatever you want," but the key difference is between "you can do whatever you want because it's legal" and "you can do whatever you want for a while, because you probably won't get caught, but what you're doing is illegal and you might one day get caught."
Now I'm a bit worried as to where my grandmother recently ended up. :| She was supposed to be donated to science. We did the same thing with my great grandmother many years ago and at least got some of her back in a box. I'm not sure they returned anything of my grandmother. :|
Yeah, we were about to donate my mother in law but I asked my husband to check with the company on military donations. The contract had an opt-out that weâd checked, but I remembered this story, so we outright asked them. They told us there is no opt out. We bailed on the agreement.
I saw a police bodycam footage on yt. A ceo of body donation company couldnât manage expenditure of his company so he dumped all the donated corpse in the middle of desert. Luckly, hunters passing by found them and called the police. However, some of them already consumed by nature (body was dismembered and scattered to near area). What a low human being.
There's a book called "Stiff" and while it's a bit older, it talks about how people don't really know where their donated bodies end up at as they can be used for a variety of things. One chapter talked about how they were used for plastic surgeons to practice their surgeries.
Exactly, John Oliver did an episode of Last Week Tonight about it. I have a rare disease and would love for my body to help find a cure but most likely I will end up in a very different scenario. I donât want my family to have to deal with that so Iâm just going to be cremated.
Highly recommend the podcast Body Brokers to anyone who is interested in learning more about this illegal trade. Told through the story of a woman in small-town Colorado who owned a trusted funeral home and it is WILD
From an outside perspective, it seems like quite a lot of things in the US are unregulated, which somewhat contributes to the overall situation we all are in right now.
In 2017 Reuters journalists did an investigation into how easy it was to get body parts from these donation companies. They were able to get a spine and human heads after a few short email exchanges. No identity verification needed. Any creep could be buying human bodies because these companies donât give a fuck as long as theyâre getting paid.
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u/theemmyk May 05 '26
The body donation industry is unregulated. There was a whole series of articles about it. They use deliberately misleading language in their contracts so that most people have no idea that their loved one's body may be sold to the military. It's really messed up.