Center for Social Innovation

A disembodied leg might help device manufacturers develop minimally invasive coronary bypass techniques. Brain tissue advances Alzheimer’s research. Skin is the only body part a pharmaceutical company conducting research for a new topical drug might need. “We don’t want anything to go to waste,” says Brent Bardsley, executive vice president and chief operating officer of the Anatomic Gift Foundation, a nonprofit whole-body donation program in Hanover, Md.

Selling body parts is mostly illegal in the United States. The Anatomic Gift Foundation and the dozen or so other nonprofit and for-profit ventures that have sprung up in the last decades say they don’t trade in cadavers; they offer procurement services. If there’s a whiff of the body snatcher in this, there is also the strangeness that comes with the creation of an industry. According to Michel Anteby, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, the moral legitimacy ... Read more