The market for cadavers is likely to result in stiff competition. According to this report, medical schools are now facing a shortage of cadavers which creates a problem training doctors. Not to mention allied health professionals, emergency medical workers, medical researchers and researchers who are studying Alzheimer's disease who need to examine a human brain. This opens the way for a market in stiffs.
It's a point taken up by Harvard Business School professor Michel Anteby .
He looks at the obvious moral and legal issues but points out that the US is the only country that has seen the development of small businesses selling cadavers, body shops as it were. Under US law, you can't sell a body but you can provide services around the "removal, processing, disposal, preservation, quality control, storage, transportation, or implantation of a part". Which basically creates the infrastructure for a cadaver market.
All this raises a number of questions. How much is a body actually worth? Does the value increase or decrease with age? Should families be notified about where the bodies are sent? What's required for someone to give their consent about donating their body for a fee? And if a company is making a profit from the sale of a body, shouldn't the donor get some of the money?
These are important questions and they'll keep coming up, particularly in cases like the KU Medical Center's Willed Body Program where a cadaver entrepreneur made thousands of dollars with no records of where the bodies were sent.
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