Transcript of What to Listen to Next :: Head Number 7

Thank you for listening to In the Shadow of Princeton. We know that you're always looking for your next true crime obsession, and we have just the podcast for you. Harvard has a problem, a body snatching problem. In 2022, the Ivy League community was shocked when it was revealed that Cedric Lodge, the Morgue manager at the Harvard Medical School, had been selling body parts to the highest bidder on Facebook. Parts from hundreds of bodies nobly donated to scientific study had been sold and delivered to collectors around the world for a variety of bizarre and macabre uses. In Head Number Seven, available now only on WNDYRI Plus, genealogist and archeologist Dr. Thierry King takes us into the illegal world of human body part trafficking, investigating the buying and selling of body parts. Cedric Lodge's descent into this criminal underworld and begging the question, who owns our bodies after they've donated to research. I'm about to play you a clip from the first episode of Head Number Seven, which is available in an ad-free listening experience for WNDYRI Plus members. You can join WNDYRI Plus in the WNDYRI app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

We should start with a warning. This series gets pretty graphic. We'll be talking about human remains, grief, and body parts. Package has been shipped. Reference.

Head. Number.

Seven. For most people, it started with a letter.

On Thursday, I got a Federal Express envelope from Harvard Medical School.

But really, the letter is the end of this story, because the story starts with an online order.

Package has been shipped.

Reference. Brains.

She's going to the post office and mailing things out, writing these memos like $1,000. Head number seven.

Is my mom's face on some creepy doll in someone's house? Is my father's skin a lampshade?

It is a story of a group of people with a niche and profitable special interest. There are anarchist types, the antiques types, the taxidermy types, the true crime lot, the medical history lot, artists, chiropractors, funeral types, the people who believe they're witches. I'm Professor Thierry King, a geneticist who specializes in ancient and forensic DNA, and this is episode one of Head Number Seven, an anatomologist cosmological gift. What happens after you die is a big question. Religious, philosophical, metaphysical. But there's one bit that most of us probably want a definitive answer to before we die. What will happen to my body after I'm gone? This is a story of when that important decision made in life is not respected in death. She said, I want to donate my body because I'm a medical doctor and I want to help students to learn. So we filled out the forms.

I went to the Anatomical Gift program.

They call it at Harvard.

Then I called the number and they said, We're sorry to say your husband's name is on the list. It's possible that there are people in England or anywhere that have my wife's body parts.

I wasn't terribly surprised that something like this happened. I was surprised that it had happened at Harvard. In the US, around 20,000 people a year donate their body to science. The simplest way to do that is to contact a local medical school. Perhaps one of the most prestigious of those would be Harvard. Harvard Medical School was founded in 1782. It's one of the oldest medical schools in the United States, occupying a big chunk of the Longwood Medical and Academic Area, a campus in Boston, Massachusetts.

Harvard Med School is part of the greater Harvard University universe. I think everybody knows Harvard, I would think across the world. But at least in the US, it is this place that is the highest echelon, the upper crust, the most prestigious university. If you get into Harvard, that is you are the best of the best. So if you get there, you've reached the pinnacle. Harvard Medical School sits within that. It's seen as one of the best, if not the best medical school in the United States.

The building itself is imposing, like a graystone version of the White House with five central pillars, the American flag flies over it, and it sits in rolling green lawns. Allie Dermanning is a Boston-based journalist, and she's host and reporter of WBUR's series, Last Seen: Post-Mortem: The Stolen Bodies of Harvard?

Harvard Medical School is actually not on Harvard's proper campus. It's over in this medical district in Boston called the Longwood Medical Area. Over in that area, there's all of the country's best hospitals hospitals. You have Boston Children's Hospital, you have Beth Israel, you have Brigham and Women's, so many great medical institutions that people flock to every single day to do research or to treat patients, in Within that crazy district is Harvard Medical School. It's these marble walls, these tall marble walls, and you walk into the campus and there's this really lush green that you can step onto, and It's so much quieter up there just because you're separated a little bit from the hustle and bustle of the road. You look up and you see these four or five-story buildings with these big marble walls, and it's quiet and also feels like something really important is happening inside.

The medical school is a byword for excellence. There are 165 student places available each year. In 2023, they received almost 8,000 1,000 applicants. 857 were interviewed, and 26% of those interviewees were accepted. If you look at Harvard Medical School on Wikipedia, you'll find a list of innovations it is credited with being involved with. Amongst them is the introduction of the smallpox vaccine to America, the first successful heart valve surgery, and the first reattachment of a severed human limb. So what I'm saying is Harvard Medical School is a big deal. It's hard to get into, has a long and storied history of innovation, and saying you studied at Harvard is a passport to career success. But on that Wikipedia page, there's another much shorter paragraph which reads, Anatomical gifts, smorg scandal, 2018 to 2022. An anatomical gift is the legal term for bodies donated to science, and these are managed by legislation.

Of course, as a society, it's important to encourage people to make this donation because doctors need to be able to study human anatomy on human remains. You don't want a doctor doing surgery on you and you're the first real body they've had.

That's Katherine Barnet Court, a medical malpractice class action attorney for US law firm, Morgan & Morgan.

It's very important for educational purposes, and it's life-saving when people donate kidneys and organs and other things are so important. Cornias, bone marrow, bones. There's so many things that are so important. So as a society, we want to encourage that. And so there is the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, which is a model statute for If you want to encourage these donations, this is a framework to help with that. And then every state has adopted some version of it, most of them the same. And what it basically says is, it says a lot of things. It has many provisions about how to set up a program. But the part that's applicable here is that the statute says, Look, we understand if you're going to make a donation of remains or of an organ or body tissues, it's got to happen in an incredibly short period of time. There's literally It has to be done. If it's not done in that time, then there's no use. The body can't be used, the tissues can't be used. In those circumstances, mistakes will happen. Even with the best of efforts, mistakes are going to happen, and we don't want to penalize anyone, a hospital, an organ, an eye bank, if something goes wrong.

For instance, if someone, it turns out they weren't the exact next of kin, or there's an error on the form that's filled out. We don't want to penalize that, so we're going to give some immunity for those kinds of things.

It's a noble final act to hope your body, which has served you, can go on to serve others, potentially helping unlock a scientific mystery. Or at the very least, help a medical student figure out what goes where before they're thrust into the operating room with real-life patients. It's a final gift to the world. But by 2018, something Something had gone terribly wrong at the Morgue of Harvard Medical School.

For years and years, over a five-year period, the Morgue manager who someone Harvard hired, supervised, trained, was running this black market body parts business out of the Morgue that was on Harvard's property.

You can listen to the rest of this episode right now by visiting the Head Number 7 show page, wherever you listen to podcasts. Then enjoy the rest of the series, exclusively and ad-free, by joining WNDRI Plus in the WNDRI app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.