Texas lawmaker vows to ban medical research on unclaimed bodies after NBC News investigation

A Texas state legislator is vowing to ban the use of unclaimed bodies for research after an NBC News investigation on University of North Texas Health Science Center.

This article is part of “Dealing the Dead,” a series investigating the use of unclaimed bodies for medical research.

A Texas state legislator is vowing to ban the use of unclaimed bodies for research in response to an NBC News investigation that found a local medical program obtained and studied hundreds of human specimens without families’ permission.

Sen. Tan Parker, a Republican whose district includes portions of Dallas and Tarrant counties, said he would introduce a bill in the legislative session in January to prohibit the use of people’s bodies unless they or their survivors give full consent.

Parker has sought in the past to crack down on the largely unregulated body broker industry. Still, he said he had no idea before seeing NBC News’ investigation that the Fort Worth-based University of North Texas Health Science Center had made money off of unclaimed bodies by dissecting them and leasing the parts to for-profit medical companies and other institutions, including the Army. Some of the people whose remains were used this way had families who were searching for them.

“I was outraged and completely just disgusted to see what had been occurring,” said Parker, noting that he fully supports the use of bodies to advance medicine, but only when the dead or their families give permission. “Human life is sacred and needs to always be protected, and that is a core principle to me.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/texas-lawmaker-ban-unclaimed-bodies-medical-research-rcna171709

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