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When Donating Your Body to Science Goes Wrong

Advocates say whole-body donations need more oversight and regulation.

ByEmilie Le Beau Lucchesi
(Credit: Ground Picture/Shutterstock)

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One year ago, an audience gathered in a hotel ballroom in Portland, Oregon. Some had paid as much as $500 to gain entrance. They watched as an instructor cut into a cadaver, and removed and disposed of its organs.

The body on the table was a World War II and Korean War veteran who had died two months earlier from COVID-19. He had intended to donate his body to Louisiana State University, but the school refused the donation due to the infection. So, a nearby funeral home offered his wife a list of other organizations that facilitated whole-body donations with research institutions.

Her chosen company, Med Ed Labs in Las Vegas, accepted the body and then sold it for $10,000 to Death Science. As described above, Death Science hosted a “cadaver dissection class” — an event that the widow later told reporters was not what she intended. She thought she ...

  • Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi

    Emilie Lucchesi has written for some of the country's largest newspapers, including The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times. She holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and an MA from DePaul University. She also holds a Ph.D. in communication from the University of Illinois-Chicago with an emphasis on media framing, message construction and stigma communication. Emilie has authored three nonfiction books. Her third, A Light in the Dark: Surviving More Than Ted Bundy, releases October 3, 2023, from Chicago Review Press and is co-authored with survivor Kathy Kleiner Rubin.

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