Corporations Are Using Human Bodies For Profit

For centuries, people have been donating their bodies to science after they die hoping that their contribution can help researchers better understand the aging process, disease progression, and help train the next generation of medical professionals. Donating their body, for many people, is the last selfless act they get to perform on this Earth. It should come as no surprise then, the corporations have found a way to turn this selfless act by their fellow citizens into a huge profit center.

Mike Papantonio and Peter Mougey go in-depth on this subject.

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Over the years, countless companies have popped up that specialize in providing cadavers to scientific organizations for their research. But not all of these companies are in business to help scientific research. In fact, a lot of them are there to make a quick buck in the most disgusting and unethical ways possible.

For nearly 10 years, a company called Science Care Incorporated had been accepting bodies that were donated by families in the name of science. The company told the families that the bodies would be studied. They'd be used for academic purposes and then cremated remains would be returned to the families at no cost.

This provided a great opportunity for low-income families who are too strapped for cash to provide elaborate funeral arrangements for their loved ones. They also got the benefit of knowing that they were helping scientific research. Unfortunately, these families that in that scenario, didn't play out like they had hoped.

In 2008, the company decided they weren't making enough money by being simply the in-between for the families and the research facilities, so they developed a new business model that they claim was based off of the business model of McDonald's. Really, these are their words.

McDonald's has a model that says no matter where you go, whether it's a McDonald's in New York or San Francisco, your Big Mac is gonna taste exactly the same. Except Science Care wasn't selling hamburgers to customers. They were selling body parts.

A year-long investigation by Reuters revealed that after the donated bodies were returned to Science Care, the staff would then dismember the bodies to sell to academics and research for further study, part by part. Rather than taking the body and cremating it and returning to the families as promised, the company decided to take the remains, chop them up, and sell them out without the family's knowledge or permission.

The cremated remains were then returned to the family. They were just leftovers that couldn't be sold off for a profit. The most shocking part of this story is that this is all 100% legal in the United States. While there are very strict regulations about donating and handling organs that are donated to be used, the donations of whole bodies is surprisingly unsupervised.

The families whose loved ones were dismembered and sold off to organizations, have now filed a lawsuit against Science Care as a result of the company's disgusting, ghoulish practice.

There were a few things that were really disturbing. I mean number one, this area is totally unregulated. So for sale of body parts, it pretty much doesn't matter as long as you say you're using it for research, you can ship those body parts. It was extremely troublesome, when you're hearing stories about body parts decomposing and shipped in brown paper or brown cardboard boxes. Bodies laying outside being thawed off with garden hoses. Body parts being cut off with chainsaws. All for a tremendous profit and totally unregulated. Scary.

The families of course, didn't anticipate that that was gonna be the case. I mean there's no question. That wasn't something that they counted on when they said, hey, we're gonna donate this body. It didn't mean part by part, arm by arm, foot by foot, leg by leg.

So look, how much money were these companies pulling in with this scheme? I guess, if they break it into parts, they were making more money. They calculated that, and they said rather than donating the whole body, let's do it part by part, and we're gonna clear more money.