A Fort Worth school has suspended a program that used unclaimed bodies for medical research and sold some of those bodies to companies around the country.
The University of North Texas Health Science Center announced the suspension in response to an investigation from NBC News, which detailed how the school had used more than 2,000 unclaimed bodies from Dallas and Tarrant counties since 2019. More than 830 bodies were used by the center for dissection and study, according to NBC News. Other bodies were sold, sometimes limb by limb, to medical research companies and even the U.S. Army, according to the report.
In a statement to NBC News, the Health Science Center said on Friday that it was immediately suspending the program and had terminated program leadership. The statement also said that the medical school would hire a consulting firm to review the program.
A spokesperson for HSC declined to say how many people were fired in response to a question from the Star-Telegram.
Separately, Tarrant County is scheduled to vote on terminating a contract with HSC at a Tuesday meeting. Since 2018, the county has given HSC “indigent and unclaimed minor children or adult decedents,” according to the contract.
The county’s original agreement with HSC said that a dead body “that is not claimed for burial or requires disposition at County expense” could be donated to HSC for “clinical training, research, and medical education programs.” After the body was used by HSC, it would be cremated with ashes returned to the decedent’s family, according to the contract. For bodies that could not be used for medical training, HSC charged the county a $300 fee per person for cremation.
On Tuesday, county commissioners will vote on whether to end the contract with HSC.
NBC News identified at least 12 people who had died and whose bodies were used by HSC without their families’ knowledge or consent. In addition, 10 companies interviewed by NBC News said they were unaware that the bodies they had purchased from HSC were not willingly donated.
Eli Shupe, a bioethicist at the University of Texas at Arlington, has been advocating against the use of unclaimed bodies in medical research since 2021, when she first learned that the practice was both legal in most states and in use by HSC and other schools. Shupe twice spoke out against the county’s contract with HSC at commissioners court meetings, and also researched the increasing use of unclaimed bodies in Texas medical education. She argued that the use of someone’s body without their consent or their families’ consent was unethical, and even donated her own body to HSC to underscore that the use of a body in medical research and education should be consciously made.
She welcomed the news that HSC decided to suspend its program.
“I feel like justice has been done,” Shupe said. “We’re finally having a public conversation about something that has happened in the quiet in our county.”
Shupe’s research helped correct the assumption that the use of unclaimed bodies was declining in the U.S. Instead, she found that the use unclaimed bodies by Texas medical schools had increased between 2017 and 2021.
