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Cadavergate Veers South
Delving into the UCLA body-selling scandal is proving to be a real eye opener to FGAQ. This goes beyond Henry Reid and his own private Igor, Ernest Nelson. It goes far beyond UCLA and their wink-wink attorneys, and into the whole world of cadaver sales, which, as I'm learning, is a vast multimillion dollar business.
I'm looking at what I wrote two days ago. "Sure, your biomedical firms likes corpses. They like 'em a lot. But buying a hot one is kind of like driving drunk in Syria - it just isn't worth the risk. You're going down. Come in here, Smithers. Officer Lewis says you've been corpsemongering."
I am feeling incredibly naïve right about now. Yesterday I read the news that corporate giant Johnson & Johnson was one of Igor's customers. Today, I'm finding out that demand is way outstripping supply. Everybody wants cadavers, including the US Army. From the Times-Picayune in New Orleans comes this amazing story. which I urge you to read:
Donated bodies blown up by Army
When Tulane University found itself with a temporary oversupply of cadavers that had been donated to science a few years ago, the school did what it usually does: It called a cadaver broker.
Tulane said it assumed the broker would ship the bodies to other universities, where medical students would dissect them. Instead, the broker sold the bodies to the Army, and the Army blew them up in land-mine experiments.
The Army says it did nothing wrong and has a legitimate need to study whether special boots can prevent land-mine injuries. The broker said he only did what brokers do: link up buyers with sellers.
As hard as it may be for you to believe, FGAQ is authentically shocked. I would think that this would be a big story, but obviously it is not. Well, you say, it's probably front page news in New Orleans. Guess again. This piece comes from the business section.
How much money National Anatomical Service made from brokering Tulane's cadavers is not clear. Anderson declined to say how much Tulane charged Scalia for the six or seven bodies the Army says it used.
An article in the March issue of Harper's Magazine, however, reported the cost at $1,000 each for seven bodies, a total of $7,000. Fran Simon, a Tulane spokeswoman, would not confirm or deny that number.
The Army paid National Anatomical Service a little less than $30,000 for the "six or seven" cadavers, said Chuck Dasey, public affairs officer for the Army's Medical Research and Materiel Command in Fort Detrick, Md. That would suggest Scalia grossed about $20,000.
These, quite literally, are your tax dollars at work. Please explain to me how throwing bodies on land mines will tell you anything about the protective power of specialized boots. Goddamn, that's insane. Look Sarge, the foot inside of this boot is perfectly intact.
The article goes on to tell you that this isn't necessarily the easy money that you might imagine.
Regardless, Scalia [the broker] said, transporting the bodies was a laborious process. The company picked up the bodies in New Orleans and transported them in a refrigerated vehicle to several locations in Texas, keeping an escort with them at all times. After the bodies were used, Scalia said, National Anatomical Service picked up the remains and cremated them before returning them to the university. The work was "so labor intensive that we've turned down other contracts with the Army" since then, he said.
But there are always more brokers and more bodies, so the Army never has to go wanting
Tulane wasn't the only university that supplied cadavers for the Army tests, Dasey said. Louisiana State University-Shreveport also provided some bodies.
Derek Daniel, a spokesman for LSU-Shreveport, said body donors sign an agreement saying their corpses will be used for "educational and research purposes." The Army experiments would fall within that, Daniel said.
You think? You think that some misguided soul who might will their body to the furtherance of science would give the thumbs up to this? You think that someone who makes their final act a charitable one, intended to educate future doctors, would sign the permit if they knew that their bodies would be blown to morbid little bits to help test combat boots? | 
