This article is part of “Dealing the Dead,” a series investigating the use of unclaimed bodies for medical research.
For five years, the unclaimed dead of Dallas and Tarrant counties were delivered to the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth.
There, the bodies were assessed based on their usefulness to medical science: Those that tested positive for infectious diseases or had begun to decompose were cremated.
The rest — more than 830 out of some 2,350 corpses since 2019 — were embalmed or placed in freezers. Some were selected to train future doctors and nurses. Others were cut into pieces and leased out to medical schools, the U.S. Army and for-profit medical technology companies.
Proponents of using unclaimed bodies for research — which is legal in most of the U.S. — have argued it makes good economic sense, saving local taxpayers thousands of dollars each year on burial costs while providing a…
