Harvard Employee Faces Charges Over Human Remains Sales

It is uncannily easy to purchase actual human remains online. For the price of $715, potential buyers can take home a human tibia, fibula and foot — complete with muscles! — from the website Skulls Unlimited. (It’s worth noting here that Skulls Unlimited also sells plenty of non-human bones, including a subscription box service — perfect for the aspiring goth in your life.) But as with nearly anything that can be bought and sold, there is both a legitimate trade in human remains and a far grayer market. And sometimes the latter can lead to arrests and criminal charges.

In an investigative report for WBUR, Ally Jarmanning chronicled the aftermath of an arrest that prompted authorities to accuse a Harvard University employee of mishandling bodies that had been donated to science. And in this case, “mishandling” means “selling illicitly to third parties.”

The Harvard employee, one Cedric Lodge, worked as a morgue manager for the university — and that gave him access to numerous bodies that had been donated and were used by medical students. As Jarmanning reported, the investigations in the wake of Lodge’s arrest revealed a shocking lack of oversight of the cadavers used by students. Jarmanning observed that “nobody at Harvard” was monitoring the state of human remains in the university’s labs, and no state regulatory body was responsible for monitoring the morgue.

One FBI agent, Paul Micah Johnson, told WBUR that few mechanisms exist to keep tabs on human remains. “We can trace a head of lettuce exactly to the particular farm from which it came and all the steps in between,” Johnson told WBUR. “That’s not required with human body parts.”

The federal case against Lodge and his wife Denise Lodge isn’t the only high-profile case of someone accused of illicitly selling human remains. A 2017 article in Pacific Standard explored some of the same issues, with author Peter Andrey Smith writing that “[i]t is shocking to learn how little federal oversight there is for these so-called non-transplant anatomical donations.”

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As WBUR’s reporting pointed out, human remains are not classified differently from other types of property from a legal point of view. The cases mentioned in that article may be shocking for their treatment of human remains, but the issue here isn’t that human remains were involved; it’s that something was sold by someone who had no right to sell it. Whether that’s adequate for the issue at hand here may be one for legal ethicists to decide.