Seven cadavers donated to Tulane University’s medical school were sold to the Army and blown up in land mine experiments, officials said Wednesday. . . .
Tulane receives up to 150 cadavers a year from donors but needs only between 40 and 45 for classes, said Mary Bitner Anderson, co-director of the Tulane School of Medicine’s Willed Body Program.
The university paid National Anatomical Service, a New York-based company that distributes bodies nationwide, less than $1,000 a body to deliver surplus cadavers, thinking they were going to medical schools in need of corpses.
The anatomical services company sold seven cadavers to the Army for between $25,000 and $30,000, said Chuck Dasey, a spokesman for the Army’s Medical Research and Materiel Command in Fort Detrick, Maryland. The bodies were blown up in tests on protective footwear against land mines at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. . . .
“There is a legitimate need for medical research and cadavers are one of the models that help medical researchers find out valuable information,” Dasey said. “Our position is that it is a regulated process. Obviously it makes some people uncomfortable.” . . .
Michael Meyer, a philosophy professor at Santa Clara University in California who has written about the ethics of donated bodies, said the military’s use is questionable because it knows donors did not expect to end up in land mine tests.
“Imagine if your mother had said all her life that she wanted her body to be used for science, and then her body was used to test land mines. I think that is disturbing, and I think there are some moral problems with deception here,” Meyer[] said. . . .
The cadaver market sure seems funky, and it may well be that people are lying to the universities. I also understand Prof. Meyer’s point about the need to be honest with the donors.
But this just doesn’t seem like much of an ethical issue to me. I take it that the donors are never told the details of what the bodies will be used for; among other things, the ultimate use may not be foreseeable at the time of the donation. They are told generally that they’ll be used for scientific or medical purposes. Figuring out how to save soldiers’ lives and limbs is a medical purpose — this isn’t testing land mines as such, it’s testing protective devices against land mines.
I realize that some potential donors might view this use either as (1) unworthy on moral grounds (not necessarily immoral, but not something they’d want to participate in — not a view that I’d take, but I suppose one that some people might take), or (2) unusually and unexpectedly grisly. But donors could say that about virtually any use, except perhaps the most obvious and well-known one (dissection in medical schools).
It seems to me that when one donates a body for unspecified medical and scientific purposes — just as when one gives money to the university for unspecified educational purposes — one can’t expect anything other than that the body will indeed be used to somehow help medical education, medical knowledge, or medical practice. Whether it ends up being used for stem-cell research, HIV research, or military trauma prevention research, no-one has been wronged. And if you really want to make sure that your body is used for some specific purpose, make sure that your gift makes this explicit (something I suspect very few gifts do), rather than expecting people to distinguish “disturbing” medical uses from nondisturbing ones.
Thanks to reader Chris B for the pointer.
UPDATE: A reader writes (emphasis mine):
Military medicine involves some experiments that are just, well, icky. And journalists love to shock the public by writing about it. Some years ago they had a delightful time outing some training exercises for medical students at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, which trains serving military officers in medicine. Various animals such as dogs, pigs and sheep were anaesthetized and wounded with military weapons like rifles and machine guns. Icky! People were shocked. Exactly how military doctors are to learn how to treat the trauma inflicted by military weapons if they don’t do icky things like this is unclear to me. In addition, as my wife (a former anatomy teacher at two medical schools) pointed out when we heard the story this morning: exactly how is it worse to have your cadaver blown up by a mine than slowly sliced to bits over a semester by medical students?
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