This article is part of “Dealing the Dead,” a series investigating the use of unclaimed bodies for medical research.
In August, a single email triggered a chain of hand-wringing and strategizing inside one of America’s largest medical technology companies: A reporter asked Boston Scientific if the biotech giant realized one of its subsidiaries had received bodies for medical training with no consent from the dead or their families.
Company leaders fretted about how the revelation from NBC News would look to investors and debated how or even whether to answer, according to internal emails received through a public records request. The company had acquired the specimens from a Texas medical school for trainings on an innovative back pain procedure, but officials said they hadn’t known the bodies were unclaimed.
“We didn’t do anything illegal or wrong,” Jessica Sachariason, Boston Scientific’s global corporate communications director, wrote to executives and an in-house lawyer. But she noted that NBC News’ findings posed “reputational risks” to the company if Boston Scientific didn't respond.
The story of how a major biotechnology company came to use the unclaimed dead offers a window into the pressing demand for human bodies — a crucial part of America’s $180 billion medical device industry, yet one that is poorly regulated and usually invisible to the public.
Using unclaimed bodies for medical research is legal in much of the country, but is widely considered unethical because of the absence of consent; the unclaimed include people whose relatives could not be reached as well as those who could not afford to make funeral arrangements.
Bodies are used in countless ways in the medical world — by doctors to hone surgical skills, by paramedics to practice lifesaving techniques and by acupuncturists learning how organs interact. And before a new medical device is deployed in human clinical trials, biotech companies often use bodies as a test. Since 2019, at least 332 medical devices that received clearance by the Food and Drug Administration cited cadaveric studies to show they were safe, according to records compiled for NBC News by Bright Data, a web data collection company.
Despite the importance of bodies in medicine, there is no data on how many are used each year, let alone how many of them are unclaimed. In investigations over the past two years, NBC News has found widespread mistreatment of the dead and their families. Local authorities have repeatedly failed to find relatives after people have died, even though the family members were reachable, leaving the bodies to go unclaimed. And some of those unclaimed bodies have been sent off for research even as people’s loved ones reported them missing or waited anxiously to hear from them.
“This is legalized grave robbing. No shovel needed,” said Janet Cope, an anatomy specialist at Elon University in North Carolina, referring to the use of unclaimed bodies. “That is what they’re doing.”
After Relievant Medsystems developed the Intracept system, a widely used surgical technique for alleviating lower back pain, Boston Scientific spent over $800 million to acquire the company last year. Boston Scientific said the Intracept procedure was expected to generate over $100 million in sales in 2024.
Relievant also was one of the biggest customers of the University of North Texas Health Science Center’s now-shuttered BioSkills laboratory in Fort Worth. The company paid more than $352,000 for access to bodies and lab space to train doctors on its invention from 2019 through 2023, shortly before it was acquired by Boston Scientific.
What Relievant did not know at the time, according to emails obtained by NBC News through a records request to the university, was that at least 25 of the bodies the company used for these trainings were unclaimed. The Health Science Center received the bodies from two local counties.
As NBC News began to ask questions, Sachariason suggested Boston Scientific publicly say that it was reviewing its work with the Health Science Center, and Kevin Barry, a company legal director, advised leaders to avoid the appearance of “turning a blind eye to UNT’s practices,” according to a lengthy email chain that was forwarded to the center.
The company should take “a definitive ethical stance,” he wrote, noting that investors could be troubled by the news.
Sachariason ultimately told NBC News that Boston Scientific and Relievant no longer worked with the Health Science Center.
The center permanently closed its BioSkills laboratory and ended its use of unclaimed bodies in September, after documents uncovered through reporters' information requests revealed “deficiencies in leadership, standards of respect and care, and professionalism,” the center’s president said.
This week, NBC News reported that one of the bodies Relievant used belonged to Aurimar Villegas, a 21-year-old Venezuelan migrant who was killed in a road rage shooting and whose family was desperately, and unsuccessfully, trying to bring her body home.
In response to follow-up questions, Sachariason sent a statement saying that the center’s use of unclaimed bodies without consent “was not in line with our understanding of the center’s willed body program.” Boston Scientific updated its policies to require consent from the donor or their next of kin, she said.
NBC News surveyed the 15 largest medical device makers and found that just two others — Johnson & Johnson and Medtronic — said they have policies against using unclaimed bodies for research or training. Fresenius Medical Care said it did not use bodies. The rest said they did not have a policy, did not respond or did not give a clear answer to NBC News’ questions.
Some companies and medical schools have switched from using bodies to alternatives like augmented and virtual reality, highly detailed interactive digital tables and lifelike synthetic models. These options have a number of advantages: They are reusable; they lack chemical preservatives that can be dangerous for students; and they come free of ethical issues.
SynDaver is a company that sells human replicas made of silicone or synthetic tissue for up to $200,000 each. Calisse Revilla, the company’s sales director, said one goal is to reduce the demand for corpses and disrupt “bad actors” who do not treat human remains with respect. “That is something that we are trying to combat,” she said.
SynDaver provides models to companies that include Boston Scientific, Johnson & Johnson and Medtronic, a representative said.
Still, no one — including Revilla — thinks the digital and synthetic alternatives will fully supplant the need for human specimens anytime soon. Doctors still will need to practice sawing into bone and suturing muscles. Each human is uniquely shaped, and that variability is key to teaching medical professionals the range of what to expect.
“Any kind of hesitation or inexperience can really cost someone their life,” said Corinne Bell, executive director of the Anatomy Gifts Registry, a nonprofit body donation organization.
Boston Scientific has used simulators to train experienced physicians on Relievant’s Intracept surgical technique, but prefers using human specimens to train new hires “who won’t necessarily have the same knowledge,” Jonnie McKee, a senior education manager, said in a summer 2024 email obtained by NBC News.
For those trainings, Relievant typically rented space in the University of North Texas Health Science Center’s BioSkills lab. Fees last year included $1,623 for the daily rental, $232 for cleanup, $42 per participant, $927 for every human torso the center provided — and $186 for each cremation, according to invoices NBC News obtained.
This training was so essential to Boston Scientific that the company wrestled with whether to cancel a September class at the Health Science Center after learning about its use of unclaimed bodies.
“Cancelling the course last minute — when we have done nothing wrong and are operating above board makes little sense to me,” Brian Betts, a Boston Scientific vice president, wrote to several colleagues in August, not long after NBC News had reached out to the company. “Cadaver trainings are a necessary part of medical education.”
When Boston Scientific asked the Health Science Center for reassurances that none of the bodies in the September training were unclaimed, the center replied that two of the bodies belonged to people with no reachable family members and two others had relatives who chose not to claim them, but that it was legal for the bodies to be used.
Boston Scientific ultimately held the training after the center confirmed in writing that it would provide bodies that had been donated with consent, Sachariason told NBC News. Andy North, a Health Science Center spokesperson, confirmed that the bodies used in the training “were either directly donated by the individual prior to death or by next of kin.”
Garland Shreves, CEO of Research for Life, a body donation company, said it’s important for bioskills labs like the one at the University of North Texas to “meet a minimum standard” of safety, ethics and transparency, which includes not using unclaimed bodies. To ensure that happens, he believes labs should be inspected by the government.
“No one should be forced to be a donor,” Shreves said. “The law may allow it in certain jurisdictions. Whether it’s allowed or not doesn’t mean we should do it.”
