An anatomy lab WIKIMEDIA, CAMPBELL UNIVERSITYFederal officials found four fetuses among various human remains in a 2013 raid of businessman Arthur Rathburn’s Detroit warehouse, Reuters reported this week (December 26). Rathburn, who formerly sold human tissues, was charged earlier this year for defrauding his customers by sending them infected body parts and will stand for trial in January 2018.
This is the latest in a series of discoveries uncovered by Reuters documenting the unregulated state of the so–called “body broker” industry, which specializes in the trade of human body parts for use in medical research and education. The majority of the 34 body broker businesses across the U.S. that were examined in investigations by the news agency earlier this year are for-profit corporations, some earning several million dollars a year.
“The current state of affairs is a free-for-all,” Angela McArthur, director of the University of Minnesota Medical School’s body donation program tells Reuters. “I don’t know if I can state this strongly enough. . . . What they are doing is profiting from the sale of humans.”
In general, buying and selling human cadavers ...
