by StinkyPantz 45 Replies latest watchtower medical
Hmmm... interesting idea. I am already an organ donor too... so donating the rest of my body to science would be a natural continuation of that. 
I think I'll add that to my Will.
Huh, come to think of it I don't have a Will... I need to take care of that.
I've been an organ donor ever since I had my license. Don't they take almost everything when you're an organ donor? What would donating a hollow shell of a body do for science? But if it did do some good, I'd go for it. Why not?
I guess I'll be bird feed.
What could would donating a hollow shell of a body do for science?
Hell, they could just stuff me with saw dust and give me to a first year med student... he's never know the difference.
well. I wanna be cremated, then i can do the full tour of Sydney. My instructions to jmacj are burn me then flush me. But...... they can take out any bits that may help someone else
Eyes................ pretty ordinary, can't see shit close up, need glasses
Lungs...............bit of Asthma, easy to control
most of the other bits are ok 2nd hand...
burn the leftovers
Steve
Ingrown toenails. Footrot. Knees are shot. Dicky bladder. Belly like a balloon. Heart palpitations. Smokers lung , teeth falling out and tunnel vision. Nothing much use here to anyone.
lol
yeah Jimbo, but a mind like a steel trap
On the "burial or cremate" thread I stated that I wanted them to take what parts they could use and burn the rest. I seriously doubt that there will be much that will be useful but they're welcome to it.
Lisa
Seriously, what Ashi said.
I've marked the honor donor thing on my driver's license and instructed the wife that I want my body harvested of any- and everything that might be of use. Then I want to be cremated.
If there's a memorial service, I hope it's exactly like Martha Carter's only with smooth jazz and Sixties soul. The woman knew how to make an exit.
Allen Tyler had a good job looking after corpses that had been donated to the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. He stored them, chopped them up, packed and shipped the parts. Then he got a wonderful idea: he would start his own enterprise on the side. What's a few toenails among friends?
by Katy Vine
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IN APRIL 2000 ALLEN TYLER made a lot of money in fingernail and toenail sales: $4,380, to be exact. That month his office received a purchase order for a batch of human nails from Watson Laboratories, a pharmaceutical company located in Salt Lake City. After shipping the order, he sent Watson an invoice, requesting that payment be made to him personally and that the check be sent to his home address, in Galveston. Watson had no qualms about that, even though the address was different from the one on its purchase order. Watson's purchasing agent did, however, make a small adjustment to reflect the fact that, while she had ordered 248 fingernails and 44 toenails, Tyler's invoice specified slightly different amounts: 256 fingernails and 24 toenails.
Tyler, then 54, worked as the supervisor of the Willed Body Program at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, a unit of the state university system that includes a hospital and a medical school. His job was to oversee the inventory of dead bodies that had been willed to the university for scientific research. He numbered and tagged them. He kept some cadavers whole for the medical students and cut the rest into parts. He shipped some of the parts to other institutions. He also wrote invoices for parts and shipping charges, sent whole bodies and body parts to be cremated, returned ashes to the families that requested them, and answered queries from the public about the program. He ordered equipment, such as the "AN-65 series cadaver lift." He met the donors in person when they enrolled in the Willed Body Program, and then he encountered those same people again after they died, steering them into the lab to bathe them, shave their heads, and dismember them if required. It was a vocation that required a fair amount of customer contact, which suited him fine. He was personable, even genteel. The balding, barrel-chested Tyler did not crack jokes; he did not raise his voice. In spite of the grim world in which he lived, he had a mild sense of humor: In his office he had a small ceramic-frog doorstop that burped "ribbit." He was reliable and hardworking, which is why he had been promoted to supervisor.
That was his official job, anyway. The nails were another matter entirely. They were part of Tyler's side business as a body-parts consultant and entrepreneur. He had started freelancing several years before, fueled by the scientific-research industry's booming, $500-million-a-year market for body tissues. Tyler served as a consultant to medical seminars that needed to procure and handle corpses. Business was good. Earlier that same month, he had billed a client $3,500 for cutting up corpses in Colorado Springs. And he had diversified into the equally lucrative trade in toenails and fingernails, which he harvested from dead bodies at UTMB and sold. For a modestly paid government employee, he was doing very well.
He was also headed for trouble. As a result of his capitalist endeavors, last year Tyler found himself at the center of one of the biggest scandals in the willed-body industry of the past century. It began when he testified before a grand jury in April 2002 that, working as a consultant, he had cut up bodies for a Riverside, California, company that had obtained them under false pretenses. (They had not been willed to science.) UTMB was embarassed by that, but it was nothing compared with what happened next. A month later, university officials discovered that Tyler had routed checks to his home that should have gone to the university, and fired him. The implication was that the university had not known that Tyler was conducting his own side business selling parts. Soon after that, the FBI launched an investigation, presumably into the question of whether Tyler had profited illegally from the interstate sale of body parts.
But those were not the only irregularities in Tyler's work. In July the scandal broke in the pages of the Houston Chronicleand the Galveston County Daily News, which reported not only that Tyler had been fired but that he had mishandled and misidentified donors' cremains (the products of cremation) that families had requested be returned to them. That same month, more than 70 angry families filed a lawsuit against UTMB, Tyler, and other parties, claiming that they had violated their agreements with willed-body-program donors.
Ever since the story appeared in the local papers, there has been a virtual lockdown on information about the case. Tyler, who remains unindicted, has never commented publicly and refused repeated requests by Texas Monthly for an interview; through his attorney, he denied any wrongdoing. UTMB, citing the many lawsuits against it, has restricted interviews with its willed-body-program staff. The current president of the Anatomical Board of the State of Texas, Ron Philo, who supervises the state's willed-body programs, has refused to comment on the case. Reconstructing the story thus required pursuing other channels of information, which included: some 20,000 documents that UTMB reluctantly released through a Public Information Act request, hundreds of pages of trial transcripts and lawyers' interrogatories, and dozens of interviews with sources at UTMB and in the medical and scientific communities in Galveston and elsewhere, as well as with acquaintances of Allen Tyler.
At the end of last year, as the crisis swirled around Tyler and UTMB, the body-parts industry came under the sort of sharp scrutiny it rarely receives. It has long operated in a sort of regulatory twilight, with minimum state oversight and no federal control at all. People began to ask unpleasant questions about what had happened?specifically?to their loved ones after they had died. Few were prepared for the unsettling answers they got.
THE STRANGE ENVIRONMENT IN WHICH Allen Tyler worked?the dead side of medecine?is a placefew people want to know anything about. It is a morbid little world of cadavers floating in phenol and glycerin baths, body parts stashed in freezers, FedEx shipments of breasts, knees, and spines, and grisly medical-school dissections. It is the abstract notion of "willing your body to science" made gruesomely real. If it is a largely unregulated world, that is in part because it is difficult to get outraged about what happens to a dead person who has donated himself to science. These people are, after all, dead.
But that would overlook the horrifying history of lawlessness where the dead are concerned. The worst cases are straight out of an Edward Gorey cartoon. Tales of body-snatching in the 1800's?digging up corpses and selling them to medical schools?were common enough. The most shocking incidents, however, are more current. According to human-rights activists, in 1992 at least thirteen indigents in Barranquilla, Colombia, were killed by the national police and sold for $150 each to the Universidad Libre for scientific purposes. In 2000 the Orange County Register's five-part series about the tissue-banking industry found that the Los Angeles County coroner was selling organs and tissue from accident and homicide victims to researchers without the families' permission.
As a result of incidents like these, there are certain laws about how the dead must be treated: bodies must be given with consent and properly labeled, handled, and transported; if you request one, you must state clearly why you need it; when families ask that ashes be returned, they must be the right ashes. And most importantly, no one may profit from the sale of bodies or body parts. Yet, supervision by the state anatomical board is minimal.
The willed-body programs themselves have relatively simple conventions. Altruistic donors sign papers stating their wishes, and when they die, they end up in labs like Tyler's at UTMB. Universities and hospitals use the cadavers as needed by their medical programs, then they share the remaining bodies with other scientific institutions.
There is currently a great demand for that surplus, especially from pharmaceutical companies and medical institutions, and Texas has long been a major supplier. Because Texas is a populous state and is home to ten willed-body programs at state universities, it collectively receives about 1,500 bodies annually, usually more than any other state. On average, at UTMB, 150 cadavers are used every year by students and researchers and 150 go to other institutions nationwide.
Those surplus corpses are, in effect, sold, though not for profit. The prices buyers pay are meant to cover all of the services pertaining to the cadavers, including the salaries of employees like Tyler, overhead, and handling and transportation. This makes UTMB's willed-body program self-supporting. Though there are state laws against profiteering, there is still the law of supply and demand. And in times of great demand, prices for parts go up, sometimes quite steeply.
IN 1965 ALLEN TYLER GOT the weirdest job a bright, somewhat eccentric recent high school graduate could ask for: UTMB anatomy technician. While his fellow classmates were scrubbing bits of fish and rice off dirty plates at the Island's many seafood restaurants, Tyler was assisting with UTMB's dead-body inventory, noting which cadavers were to stay in the lab for the medical students and which were to be sent to other institutions.
He had first come to UTMB in 1962, as a sixteen-year-old high school sophomore. Back then, he worked at a sandwich shop at the university. He was a large, reserved teenager who had already developed a distinctive?some would say odd?personal style. He was sometimes seen walking to Galveston's Central High, the segregated black school he attended, in an ascot and a derby. In his junior year he bought a red-and-white Corvair with a red-leather interior. He read Ian Fleming spy novels and Esquire magazine. In 1964, while still in high school and making sandwiches at UTMB, he married a churchgoing woman ten years his senior who suffered from a serious vision impairment that made her legally blind. Upon graduation, when many of his classmates were going to college, Tyler settled into married life with his wife and new baby girl and searched for a job with better pay. A year later, he made the jump from the sandwich shop to the body lab.
Tyler did well at the new job and stuck with it. In 1975 he was promoted to the position of supervisor of anatomical services. He prepared the bodies for students, passed out the knives and saws, cared for the "natural curiosities" display (two-headed animals and the like), and kept the perfume of chemicals and decay to a minimum. Once in a while he received a particularly difficult piece of work: for example, a man who had fallen off a roof headfirst into some tar. But no gift to the program was wasted. And Tyler was scrupulous about labeling and sorting the bodies. He noted which bodies could be cremated en masse and stored in one of the large drums on hand, and whose cremains were destined to be returned to families. This was an important part of his job: Even though it is understood that a willed body will be cut up or dissected, some families still want to be assured that they will receive the ashes of their loved ones.
By the eighties, Tyler had done so well that the entire willed-body program was basically left in his charge. Working with a secretary and a lab technician, he went about his business in Old Red, the gorgeously ornate UTMB structure built in 1891, the year that UTMB opened its first session, with 23 students and 13 faculty members. He spent some of his time in the anatomy lab, which was on the top floor of the building. More often than not, however, he was in the cutting room or in his office, which was a disorganized jumble of papers.
Over the years, Tyler discovered the tricks of the trade: He learned that a body takes up to four days to defrost; he knew how to deal with the bodies' liquids; he learned to prep bowels and fix leakage. He familiarized himself with the organization of the students' lab: The red buckets with garbage bags under the tables were for skin and fat only; the other red containers were for scalpel blades and sharp items. Much of his job as supervisor also involved disarticulation, the process by which a body is cut up into its various parts so that it can be used most efficiently.
But the body-parts business was changing in several important ways. In the eighties Johnson and Johnson, Tyco, Boston Scientific, and other companies in the medical-technology business were inventing advanced surgical equipment at a rapid pace. Instruments facilitating their new methods of surgery required training courses. Some seminars used plastic organs and bodies, but often models were not adequate for training. As the number of seminars increased, so did the demand for cadavers and body parts. Since Texas had a surplus of bodies, Tyler found himself spending more and more of his time filling orders for fresh frozen heads, feet, shoulders, and elbows.
Meanwhile, prices were going up, putting Tyler in the awkward position of having to deliver the news to his customers. A disarticulated torso could fetch about $7,000 in the late nineties, but the price soon shot up to $9,000. On one occasion, Tyler received an e-mail asking, "Is $650 still the right price for these [full leg specimens]?" to which he responded, "Attached is listing to date. I will be doing another pair on Monday that fits your protocol, almost there as you can see, I predict less than two weeks, and I will be ready to ship. Unfortunately prices have gone up. The cost for a whole lower extremity is $813. Even the cost [of] knees [has] gone up ($500) also, however, I am holding the line to what I quoted you on the knees ($400 each)." None of this revenue was technically "profit," since by law it went directly back into the program to cover costs.
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