Ownership of Organs After Death

Hello welcome to Vest of Science. I'm Hanah Frry. And I'm Mael Steven. We're starting today, Michael.ave haveave you held on to any body parts You know, children's teeth, for example, would be the normal one My daughter hasn't lost teeth yet, but my mother still has all of my baby teeth. right? In a little container in her cabinet, in her kitchen. That's I'm somewhere between adorable and creepy I know, right? but it's not creepy I have kept all of my daughter's teeth actually. Yeah, and I'm not sure which one's which are. Oh, ' you've got multiple multiple daughters. But don't you have separate containers for them? I probably should have done that.. My mom has kept mine and my sister's teeth like labeled. Oh' I only have one child. So when I look and I find an old dried up piece of umbilical cord, I know that it's hers But I've kept that, I've kept cuttings from my daughter's first haircut. Oh, you know what? this isn't a body part, but I kept a bandage from my cat Because when I took the bandage off, the bloodstain on it was Heart shape I mean Perfect, like uncanny I'll to show you a photo later if I can find one, we'll put it in the episode. I was just using some industry terms. That's it. Oh and of course my bag of beard hair. Wait, tell me that you did not bring your bag of beard hair I didn't bring my bag of beard hair, but I once shaved my beard off for charity and there was way more beard hair than like we could In good conscience give a person So so I but I kept the rest of it because I'm like my beard won't be this color. forever, it's turning greay. so I should keep someome samples from before it turned gray, and I've just got a little ziplog bag of it pinned onto my pegboard as like a memory. Okay. I mean, if you think that's getting towards creepy, you're not alone. But also just you wait until what we've got lined up in this episode Th was me talking to the listeners rather than new. No, Michael, that's perfectly normal, keeping hold of all of that stuff Thank you It is interesting that your mum has still got your teeth because Aren't they yours? That's right, they're not hers Does she own them? I mean, she'd give them to me if I asked, but could she sell them Hm Do you own them? Do you even have rights to them? I mean, they've left your body. Yeah, what if she refused to give them back? What a judge Tell her to Those are the kind of questions that we're going to be answering today, specifically about body parts, but we've got a bit of a sort of demi series that is loosely themed around this idea of what partart of yourself Do you have rights to? What part of yourself do you own? What partarts of others do you have rights to? parts of things that aren't even on Earth Pre pretty exciting st., prettyty exciting st. We're gonna start with body parts today. Starting with body parts today, absolutely This episode is brought to you by Cancer Rarch UK. Here is something strange Your DNA contains more ancient viral fragments than jeans The genes that build our cells make up only two percent of our DNA. And for years, that is what scientists focused on. They treated the rest, the ancient viruses and stuff as junk. But now we know that that hidden majority, sometimes called the dark genome, influences how our biology works and how diseases like cancer It's a reminder that progress rarely comes as a single breakthrough. It builds gradually. Cancer Research UK plays a central role in that progress, supporting decades of research into over two hundred types of cancer, work that's helped double survival in the UK over the past fifty years. 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Join the Nordy Club to unlock exclusive discounts, shop new arrivals first, and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack teeeth fell out when I was a kid on their own natural accord. Yeah. But if I got like an arm amputated What happens to the arm So I think this It's kind of up to you. You can just leave it out at the hospital. they can incinerate it, you know with all of the other things that they cut off and out of people medical tissue does end up going down that route. Yeah. But you can, if you want to, you can ask for it You can say I want to keep Are there I'm sure there' a condition. This, by the way, in the UK is regulated by the human tissue Authority. Okay, I think the U.S has something very. Absolutely. And they say you are legally free to do anything with an amputated limb Provided it isn't a public health risk. Exactly. Right. I couldn't keep my amputated arm in order to Freak out my neighbor or let it sit there and decay and mold and then spread disease. Yeah. But could I have someone taxidermia y it? You could have somebody taxidemia if you wanted. You can I mean, you can go more imaginative than this, by the way. You can accelerate the process of removing the tissue from the bones And then you can do whatever you want with it, including scaring your neighbourors So they R. Okay, so as long as it's just like a dry bone, exact, that isn't a health risk, evenven if it's a mental health risk because If I opened my door and my neighbor's bones were on my front porch I might be like Yum Or or you might find it quite funny. Yeah, right? It on depends on the way they the way that There's gotta be like some public decency laws around this. I'm not sure there are, you know? becausecause okay, so there's one amazing story that I found. This is Christie Loyal from Oklahoma So she had cancer, this really this really rare type of it's called epithyelloid sarcoma And it's this soft tissue cancer. So she had to have her leg amputated. This is in twenty eleven. And so what she did is, she took her amputated leg the sort of foot and like the just above the ankle I took it to a company called Skulls Unlimited., right I wonder if you guys know what they do. They use flesh eating beetles to strip it down time. So she fed some beetles. She fed some beetles And then she's got this like fully articulated skeleton first. was part of her body and she post pictures of it to Instagram. And they are amazing these pictures and they're very, very funny. Can I show you? Yeah, please. Okay. So Do she pose it? She does. here it is kicking a soccer ball. Yeah, absolutely. Here's a couple of them. If you want to describe some of these? So one is a photograph of It looks like it's the bones of her foot on one side and then next to it is a living human foot, I'm assuming her remaining foot. in a sock that's designed to look like the bones of the foot o now here, so she's got her leg going down into sand. Yeah, she's lying on a beach. She's lying on a beach and her leg like kind of below the knee is under the sand, but then poking up a little further on are the bones of her foot. Where they ordinarily would Where they ordinarily would be. Oh, and here is her at ankle skeleton inside a transparent shoe. So you can look through the shoe material and see that there's bones inside. It's amazing how different it is psychologically to see a like plastic Foot skeleton versus a real one knownowing that it really came from a person, because I don't know what my bones look like. I've never seen them But they're in there and they've been Me course they've changed over time, but they've been with me forever. Like I owe so much to them and yet I don' I wouldn't recognize them if I saw them on the street. No, no. And this idea of the psychology of it, I think when it comes to people who go through amputations You know, agutation can really trigger this profound sense of grief in. You know, it's a trauma that's sort of comparable to the bereavement of a loved one, right in a lot of ways And there are some studies that say if you have control over what happens to your limb, then actually it's much easier to have this sort of positive I mean, you're never really going have that much of a positive experience if you're going through an amputation, but it helps you kind of grieve the passing of your limbbs. Oh for sure. I can totally see that. I can see how some people might grieve better if they just never see it again. Yeah. But if someone wants to have a funeral for their amputated hand Letem, right? Yeah. Yeah And if you don't wantan to have a funeral where you are burying it in your garden, know, or having a bonfire or whatever it might be, if there's something a bit grotesque about you burning your own limb There is now a dedicated burial site for amputated limbs in the UK. Oh, really? Yeah, where you can go and you can basically have a funeral exactly as you describe for the part of you that That seems nice. I might actually do something like that because I think if I had, say my arm amputated, I'd really I want to show it respect. It was my arm. It did a good job, you know, It didn't do anything bad against me, it let me control it forever. like ye I have a very good friend who is Islamic and she told me that There's this idea where when you die, all of your body parts testify against you Right And Oh Okaykay, but that sounds a bit What you mean is like if I've committed a sin with my hand will Wp me out. Or it's more like, so my understanding of it, okay, is that When you're walking around in life and you say, o, my damn knees, they're really annoying, they're just not strong enough. I hate them, whatever. And then after you die, your knees are there testifying against you and saying, look at all of those stairs I carried her up. Look at her baby who I helped her carry for nine months. and then all the times she sort of carried her child and I was there supporting her And then she speent the rest of her life slagging me off, you know, like this is really unfair. Right. But there's something actually quite beautiful about that, this idea that you have to genuine gratitude for all of your body parts for the support that they give you while you're alive because after you're dead they' testify against you If you were not a good Steward of them. Yeah. Now I have to say, I'm not a scholar of Islam. So people please let us know in the comments if I have misunderstood that. Right. But I think there's something quite beautiful about that. It really is beautiful So I mean, what restrictions are there? You said in the UK, you can have your own amputated parts so long as There's no public health risk I mean, kindind of you can't cremate it. That is one thing you can't do. Wait, tell me more. You can't So you can put it in a bonfire in your own garden. Yeah as long as it's not in pub health for us as long as to do it safely. But you can't take it to a you know, a cremation site, you can't take it to a company that does cremation for you and ask them to do it. And that's because of the rules within the sort of cremation industry. You can't legally have it cremated at a crematorium while you're still alive And that is because crematoriums, this feels like a good rule, legally require a death certificate in order to operate. So you know, if you're still there handing over your limb, they're not allowed to do it. Yeah, I get why they would need a death certificate because otherwise it could be a really great hack to get rid of a body that you've murdered Like, o, hey Here's my Aunt Fow. Could you please uh Dispose of the evidence, I mean cremate her respectfully Right, okay. certainly that law could probably be changed to also require a certificate of amputation or something. Or maybe maybe yeah, the authority of the individual to whom it once belonged. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, apart from that, really, you can sort of go, wild, you can sell it if you want to. Okay, that's where I wanted to go next because that woman's foot looks really cool. Yeah. the skeletonool of her foot bones and ankle like Could she sell that to me? Yes, absolutely. And you can buy, so I had a look at this yesterday, you can buy all kinds of body parts, particularly the bones, you know, basically as easily as buying a book. Now hold on a second because I've looked into this. I've been wanting a human skeleton my whole life. A whole skeleton. A whole real human skeleton. Here's the problem Ethhics of it. M human skeletons that are available for purchase are of dubious provenance. They're usually like, yeah, this is from a person who lived in India in eighteen ninety seven probablyroably didn't totally consent to this. It probably wasn't their dream for you to display their skeleton, but it's here. And we can no longer just do what people did in the nineteenth century So Here's what I want to do and you can tell me if this is going to be more possible I would love a human skeleton, but I want it to be Jeff Bezos's skeleton. Specifically. Specifically his. Have you written to him and told him this is your plan? No, but let's say that this is my official declaration to Jeff Bezos Give me your skeleton. And here's why him orr maybe someone like him It needs to be someone who isn't super sympathetic So that if someone comes into my house and they see a human skeleton and I've got a silly hat on it and they're like dude That's disrespectful. I can say it was Jeff Bezos He had a bunch of money in life. He's fine Like they can do it I don't want the skeleton to belong to like an innocent person who Even if they fully consented to like, I want you to exhibit my skeleton ever I still would feel like I it deserved a certain amount of respect that I might not always want to give it. So I want someone skeleton that could be put into funny poses. What if it was someone who just had a really, really good sense of humor? Like what if you went for a famous comedian? Well, yes, okay, here's an even better example. L I would be totally happy to give my wife or my daughter my skeleton after my death, and they can do whatever they want with it. They can make me pick my butt, they can make me do whatever, because that's my sense of humor. right? In fact, here's another declaration. My wife refuses to do this, but instead of like a grave stone, I want a toilet is like a bench But it's a toilet that has like in memory of Michael Stevens and people can sit on it and look at the view. But she doesn't want toilet to be my tombstone. Wait, sorry, I misunderstood. Why do you want a toilet to be your tombstone? Because it's just funny, it's just a bit. Yeah. It's just like a, hey, why is there a toilet in the cemetery? Now maybe that's disrespectful to the other people buried there. Because suddenly you turn the cemetery into a bath. I turn it into a bathroom So maybe it's more like a public park puts up a memorial toilet for me. I do like the idea of having a bit after you die. You know, Spike Milligan, this very amazing British wrer comedy writer, on his tombstone, he had insisted that it had inscribed, I told you I was ill. really li. Yeah, that's really good. And I just I like not taking it all too seriously. My idea for having a memorial toilet for myself comes from this artist's installation in the UK for a memorial to Joseph Grimaldi, the clown. where the artist put these like coffin shaped musical tiles on the ground, so you could dance on the grave of Grimaldi to make music And being as he's a clown and it all felt like it actually kind of all fit, but yet it feels a bit disrespectful to be dancing on a grave. Now he isn't actually buried underneath them But I liked a silly Odd Ball Memorial There is somebody who has donated their skeleton to be displayed forever, though. Who Jeremy Bentham. Oh, of course, Yeah. Right. I've never seen it, but you've seen it. I've seen it. Oh, I've seen it. And is it a skeleton or is there still like dried flesh on it? Oh, there's dri Well, okay, so there's a couple of different parts gruesome. So we should just say Jeremy Bentham's he's the father of utilitarianism, this philosopher, but he also was one of the founders of the university which I did my PhD and was a professor for a number of years. This is like eighteen thirties was when he died And he wanted to donate his body to science. He was like, I think that actually a great act would be to have a public dissection of my body, you know, let people seem, you know and I want it to be on display. I want my body to be on display. So they did disct for like the public's knowledge or was it that he I found it kind of titillating, like it was an exhibitionist thing. I think it was for public knowledge. Okay. I guess we can't prove what was really in his mind. Well what happened to his head is Yeah, I've heard it got like turned into a soccer ball or something. Yeah, it's pretty gruesome. So one of the they decided the flesh on his body was dissected and his skeleton has been packed into a suit sort of like it looks like a wax work figure like a Madame Taord type thing. So he's kind of like sitting there in this pose and he's got all his clothes on. It's on display permanently. But can you see the bones or are they covered in? No they wax They're covered in wax. He sits in this glass cabinet in the cloisters of UCL permanently. So you can just go past and just see his dead body at all times But his head, what they wanted to do There was this technique that people were trying, which was dehydrate the head, sort of like a mummification technique. And so his head, it I think it didn't really work very well. I think they didn't get the mixture right. So it's sort of this like grotesque leathery raisin, right? It's really not very nice at all. So that's kept separate from the body. You kind of so it's stored to be seen with no head. No, it's got a wax head on it. Oh, and there's no skull inside the w No skull inside the the head is kept The real skull is kept separate. It' still, I think's on display. I've certainly seen it. So I think it's on display sometimes not all of the time. The thing is that ha, right is obviously this gray object of reverence and importance to UCL. And so there have been times when the rivals of UCL, Kings's College London, have broken in, stolen it, used it for ransom. There was one story about them in the cloisters of using it as a football you know, just like really not cool Victorian shenanigans going on. Yeah. But I should also say that his body, while it is on display, he also still attends The meetings that they have. like you kind of big important meetings. R They bring as theying them in bones in. And then they always record in the minutes that Jeremy Brentham was present but did not vote. I love that kind kind of. That' what would have wanted. That's what he would have wanted. So then that's great. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what you can do too. He was like over my dead body do stuff and they are. And's that's I mean, the thing is this is like eighteen thirty. he died, eighteen thirty two, I think. So it's becing two hundred years. Right. And I think this is it, you know, or your idea of giving your skeleton to your daughter your wife so you can ose you have you on. you're going to your sle is are will outlast their lifetimes really significantly.ight, So who gets it after them? Who gets it after and who gets after and after? I mean, this is like a big question Tell you what, let's come back to that properly after the break actually, about what you do with people after they've died, but just on that whole idea of amputation of body parts first Because while this idea of selling them or taxiderming them are kind of normal things to do. There is one story about a young man who had his foot amputated in a motorbike crash And he managed to successfully navigate all of the legal loopholes to take his severed lib home and instead of bearying it, He took a bit of his own anterior muscle it with onions and peppers and served in fjitas to ten of his friends. hisis friends knew what was going on. Okay, yes. Okay. I was going to ask this before the break. I'm like, hold on a second. You can take it and you can cremate it and you can display it, but can you eat it? Tell me Absolutely fine. That was fine. Absolutely fine. So feeding it to other people consensually with their knowledge is allowed to that's like a loophole to be able to eat human flesh. Yeah. So what did it taste like? I don't know. Surely he ate some of it without the onions and whatnot. ' I I would want to get the real flavor. I did an episode years ago about what does human taste like And I hadn't heard of this motorbike incident. did that happen after I made the episode? Because I had to go back pretty far to a guy who got some meat from a cadaver and said that human meat most closely resembled veal H But This motorbike story. Okay, some people have asked How would you describe the t on a scale of one to ten And he said, giveive it a solid six point five. betteret than hot dog or regular burger may be equal with regular bacon, but nowhere near as good as butter served scallops or souousie teentloin, seared in grapes seed oil and cast iron pan. Well, that's a pretty good review, better than hot dogs and burgers I'm surprised because You know, we're not talking about a choice cut. No animal. No, we're not. L we're talking about what? a muscle from the like the ankle or the foot. Yeah. Like that's not a famously tender cut of meat. When did this happen This is seven years ago. Oh, hey, I made my episode twelve years ago, so I should do an update. You do need I should have been invited to that fajita party. I'm a bit upset. Do you think he still has some? Should we message him and ask? Yeah, I'll message him after the show because I would love to try some of this meat. He says, tastes like buffalo, but chewier, super beefy and little fat beefy. Yeah, there'd be a little fat.. What you really need, has anyone ever had their I was gonna say if they've ever had their like loins or chest amputated. I don't think there's a lot of chest amputations but I'd love it like a human rib, but that's never gonna to happen. No but awful. I mean, I had my uterus amputated effectively. likeike I should have if I'd have known about this at the time, I could have had some awful. Bututerus. Placenta, I mean, people eat placenta. People eat placenta. Apparently it's not like a traditional thing That it really only became a thing in the seventies. eating your own placenta. I think it's not a real thing I think it's not a traditional. I think there are reasons why in the animal world, outside of humans, it makes a lot of sense when nutrition is hard to and you've got a breastfeed, you need that nutrition. but in The human world it's rarely necessary But as I keep saying, I feel like I've said this like now three times on the podcast, the placenta is vegan. It is vegan. becausecause the animal has voluntarily abandoned it. If they haven't eaten it themselves Dig in Hey, so is this food. These were vegan fajitas they were eating. That's right. Yeah. he voluntarily and gave it to his friends. Yeah. So if any of you have an invitation coming up then we to invite Michael around for lunch. Yeah, please invite me. And as a bonus, I would really love to be the one to cook it. smoke it. It's one of my hobbies. It's like one of the few things I can do that doesn't feel like work Even if I'm watching a movie I still I feel like this might inform some episode about society or whatever I do that for my family all the time. I cook all of our dinners and it's just like I love it. So I'd love to be able to cook human meat and say here's the thing about human meat, you know, you gott to stew it Or here's the thing, you gotta smoke it, You gotta use apple or cherry. Don't use Hickory. I would love to just have knowledge like that. Hold on though, that doesn't that make your smoke a thing art of work then immediately if you're doing it for human meat and then talking about it after. Okay, if I talk about it on the podcast that's different than if I use it in a Vauce episode, I feel like here this is where I share my life. This is where I share my tips and tricks on eating people. I wouldn't do that outside of this podcast. Would you consider doing that? Would you consider having a bit of flesh removed for this purpose? That is a really good question because I don't think that I would if it wasn't necessary. I still feel too much of a like obligation to my body to like respect it and I can't think of why I would deliberately have muscle removed so I could eat it I'd feel guilty Like, I'm sorry, you know, butt cheek that I trimmed you down I guess if I did like u, Lposuction. If I had liposuction Could I keep the fat? and drink it Well, I would like render it first And then I could like poach some, you know sccallops in it. O. humuman fat. I wonder what that would taste like Is it more like lard or tallow malts. I'm surprised that it' beef th now. I would have guess it would be more piggy. Yeah, what determines whether something is beefy or pigy I know that there's been reports from hundreds of years ago where people ate human meat and said that it was like veal pork. And now veal is beefy Unlike a cow, humans don't eat grass. Like our diet is more like a pig's diet. It's omnivorous. So I would think that that would cause us to taste more like pork since you are what you eat. And I think it would also really depend on where you cut the meat from. I think you're right. I think that would make a big difference You know, if you're if you're eating ankle muscle I mean, I don't think you get a good sense of what the overall thing tastes like. Yeah, yeah Ankle, shin, those are famously bad pieces of meat. You just slow cook that stuff, not put it in a theater. Well, it depends. If you put it in like a slow cooker and let it just stew there with a bunch of seasonings, it could get nice. It could get nice. Okay, Ill tell you what, I think let's go for a break And then, I mean, up until now, this has mostly been about people who are alive. deciding what to do with their own body parts. After the break, I want to talk about what happens to your body parts after your death they belong to Great Hi, this is Garalinica from Goldhangers. The restest is Football. This episode is brought to you by Wise. It's only when you start moving money between currencies that you really think about the exchange rate, the fee and what might be hidden away in the small print. Whether you're living abroad, paying someone overseas, or just trying to manage your money across borders, you want a fair exchange rate and easy transfer and no surprises along the way. WiseE keeps things simple. Wise is a smart way to move the currencies you need around the globe. It works in more than one hundred sixty countries and with over forty currencies mostost transfers arrive instantly. Wise uses the mid market exchange rate, like the one you see on Google, with no markups or hidden fees. So when money needs to move, you can see the rate, know the fee, and get on with it. 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You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EBGLS Before starting Eppllus, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection Ask your doctor about EvlS and visit Eglus. liily. com or call one eight hundred Lily R X or one one hundred five four five five nine seven nine Welcome back. So there's quite a tragic story that I want to tell you about that I think really indicates This idea of ownership of your own body particularly after your death. So there was a woman who was twenty one years old, which was called Laura and she a little girl, two and a half years old Her mother, called Rachel, she had this kidney failure, right? So you got three women, basically three Th generations. Three generations, right? Grandmother, mother, daughter the grandmother has kidney failure, really serious kidney failure that was actually triggered by diabetes that she'd had when she'd been pregnant her daughter. okay. So it's all kind of connected. Yeah. And Laura, the daughter the twenty one year old was going to donate her kidney to her mother. Yeah. So at that point, when you say, I'm alive, I'm going to give you my kidney. you have complete ownership over your own organ. Makesense to decide what happens to it But unfortunately, before any of the paperwork could be sorted, Laura just so happened to suffer this massive fatal asthma attack Whoa. Okay. So she hasn't a she She died before she signed the paperwork officially giving her kidneys to her mother. Correct even if She had the paperwork before she'd been alive As soon as she was dead, she can donate her kidneys and her family cons sent on her behalf to donate her kidneys but she has no say. who that kidney goes to Yeah. So the human tissue authority, the people who regulate all this stuff They had to step in to basically enforce these really strict laws that we have about bodily ownership The legal stance of this is, you know, she was donating her organs fine She couldn't say that they would go to her mother because a corpse cannot be property Yeah. like humans are not objects And so if they are not objects, if they are not property, they don't belong to anybody. In life, she could make the decision to give my kidney while I'm alive to this specific person.. But once she's dead. Now you say a corpse isn't property, but I can own an amputated Hand, for example, you can and buy and sell it. You can, yes, you can buy and sell it, which is like a bit of a weird grreay area But in terms of organs, the organ removal then went to the person who needed it the most. Right, Which in that case, wasn't the mother. You had is really tragic story, right? You had the transplant coordinator who was literally crying in the hospital, and nonetheless, that the kidneys had to be given to these anonymous strangers who were on this national waiting list And the real tragedy of this is that the grandmother, Rachel who was denied this organ transplant actually then very sadly passed away before she could get another shee. It reallyally awful story leaving the two and a half year old daughter without a mother or a grandmother. Yeah The laws have changed as a result of I was gonna say I feel like it would be fair to say if you're going to donate your organs after death, a relative who needs them who has a use for them. precedent over who's at the top of the waiting list. Yeah. So that does now happen as long as there isn't a super urgent case on the waiting list. Okay. Within seventy two hours, I think of the donation. Got it o Yeah. So now a family member does take breston. Well, because we've got two kidneys They could have given one to someone at the top of the list and the other to the grandma. Yeah. but there's I think that there's this really Interesting philosophical question that comes into all of this because this isn't the first time that bodies not being property and therefore not belonging, you know it's not something that you can say this is my Because if it was a will, right? If it was her house or her car or whatever, of course she gets to dictate in very strict terms where it should go to because it belonged to her body rather than It was a different type of ownership You know, everything kind of goes out the window. This is actually because of these ancient church laws that we have. know the idea that it's called res nullis, meaning it belongs to nobody, right This body But this was also the reason or a great cause of all of the grave robbing that happened in the eighteen hundreds when dissection became really popular. The notion that the body doesn't belong to anyone meant that finders keepers. Y, finders keepers. So it meant that you couldn't be legally charged for stealing a corpse, but you could be charged with a really serious felony if you stole the clothes that the person was buried in So then this additional indignity like eighteen hundreds, right? Professional body snatchers would take the bodies out of the grave and then meticulously make it. Yeah before sealing them and then make their getaway which is just absolutely insane that stealing a human fine, but cheap lin' shirt you get sent toight Right right. Yeah. Stealing a naked body, That's fine. Stealing one in clothes. You're a clothing thief So what they that's been changed? That has well I don't know whether that has properly been changed Like if I went and I dug up a grave right now I feel like I'd get in trouble for trespassing and destroying property and defiling a dead body, which is like scandalous to the public even if I wasn't charged with I think there's also, what would you do with it Where would you go with it? How would you profit off it? Because one of the big reasons why grave robbing was such a big thing was that there was incredible demand from scientists and medics and doctors who wanted to understand how the body worked, right? Dissection was this really big thing going on And that all changed in eighteen thirty two. when u brought in a new law that said the medical dissection of unclaimed bodies was completely fine. So if you were I mean it's basically it's code for extremely poor. If you were extremely poor, then you were fair game. while a body cannot be owned, it can be claimed. Yeah, right. Yeah. Eactly. I think that's that distinction makes sense. I think owning owning someone's body after they're dead That sounds a bit odd I can bequeath my bones to my daughter and she can own them when she can't own the whole body or she can't own organs. Right. so I've just looked up because it does feel like a big contradiction, doesn't it? that you can a dead body isn't property, but you can own a skeleton. Right. And apparently the short answer is that it becomes property when somebody applies work and skill to it. Okay Right. So if they amputate my foot That's like some work that's been done. Yeah. s just someone dying, it's not up for grabs. R Right If I saw someone have a heart attack at the store, I couldn't be like mine, mine. But if they died A hospital could harvest their organs and give them to me if I'm like on the list. Not quite.ight. So just if you just amputated it, that doesn't count, that doesn't meet the threshold for work and skill. Youve got to do something else to it. Youve got to feed it to beetles Okay, okay But the hospital Can they send my amputated limb home with me or does it have to be like sketged up or cleaned before I can take it home I think it definitely has to be in a special bag. It's probably got to be a special bag.t think you're alled to had a tooth remove. And I asked if we could have it And the doctor said, the problem is they hadn't just like pulled it out. They'd had to crunch it up So it was all in like pieces. and she so I think she had like already thrown it out could have given us the pieces. I've got a lot of cat teeth. cat who needed teeth removed. And I'm like, canan I have them? And they were like, sureure, yeah. And they're pretty awesome. I feel like a witch with my little like cat toooth jar and I'm like, ooh yes, I need a little cat tooth for this love potion. Powdered cat tooth. Yeah. and a heart shaped bloodstain I think there is a lot of grreay area around the stuff. That idea though, of owning somebody's body after they have died. I mean, you brought up the ethics of skeletons earlier. I mean, there are some really dark stories, some really nasty stories. I think possibly the most grotesque I heard about and then I looked into it this College in Oxford where at the end of dinner, they would drink from a skull. rightight? Yeah. Absolutely true. Whoose skull Well, this is the really dark thing. So no one is quite sure, but this was a decadees long tradition. They don't do it anymore they turned into a dessert bowl after it started leaking, which is just even more grotesque But the cup was donated to the college in nineteen forty six by a eugenicist. rightight, Which tells you the direction this is going to go in. It was originally bought at an auction in Sotheby's in eighteen eighty four when people have done radioc carbon dating on it. The skull is two hundred and twenty five years old and the physical dimensions of it strongly suggest that it belonged to an enslaved woman in the Caribbean Yeah. That's usually the provenance of these kinds of things. It was someone who didn't have the rights that they deserved to say take my skeleton and sell it to some rich dude in England.. It's usually not just like Jeff Bezos because he's got power and he can decide what happens to his skeleton But a person who is homeless, a person who is oppressed, That's usually the kind of thing that winds up being out there on the market. And so that's why, Jeff, you owe it to the world to give me your skeleton So I had a look online yesterday Skulls Unlimited, is a place that you can buy and sell them. You can buy a skull for a couple of grand. Yeah. You can buy a fetal skull as well. and it's really grotesque. like a lot of this stuff really dark. If I was a medical school I would think that acquiring pieces like that could be helpful for continuing education. The greater good put in my own home, no. Yeah. agree. unless it was like Yeah, this person either wanted someone to own and display their remains or this person deserves a little disrespect. Just here and there around. Yeah, just a little bit, just like for bunzies. yeah. Lord Byron did this once, you know He had this massive estate and his gardener was digging up in the grounds and just came across loads of skulls from monks who hadd lived there a century earlier Would you like to guess what Byron did with them? He was nineteen years old at the time, by the way Byron's got quite reputation. How many? like a lot? a few, more than one, notot sure how many Uh did you do something decorative with them? He made him into drinking goblets. Oh, he did. Yeah. had goblets. had them polished and mounted on a silver stand. And where are they now Do we know? Because his estate was purchased by a big game hunter and his wife And the wife was a devout Christian and thought it was absolutely disgusting. She thought it was this horrible. but saying the barn had done And so she dismantled the gobler With the silver removed, she gave the monks skull a proper Christian blessing and then secretly re buried it somewhere on the vast grounds of the estate. Okay That's kind of a nice thing to do decent Right. They did not ask for their skulls to be turned into goblets. He wrote a poem about it as well. Oh we did. Yeah in it was called lines inscribed upon a cup formed from a skull I mean, for someone who was known for his words, that's not a particular good title, I don't think. Wouldn't work on YouTube. It's a descriptiveitle. It I think it could work on YouTube. It depends on what like his brand is. Gblet prank, gone, skull. Anyway, he said that it was better for a skull to hold the drink of gods than to be food for worms Esentially, that's what the poems about. It depends on what the monks wanted. I think it depends on what the monks wanted. and I think that probably the monks, you know, didn't want to be slobbered over for the rest of time. Yeah I think you've got to be careful about this wish to give your skeleton to your family, you know I trust them too. I just don't trust the many generations of people to come afterwards. I mean, yeah, I don't either, but that's fine with me. Like I know could happen and I'm fine with. You're okay with it. I do want my flesh to go back to the earth though. I think that I At least the stuff that the Earth wants Back that earthworms and microbes will eat, they should take back bones, I think are less interesting to living things And so it's fine, I think, for them in my opinion, to stick around as toys or decorations. Things wearing silly hats for the rest of time. I've always thought about the privacy rights of it all, like we've got King Tut's body And we've just like taken photographs and you can see it. After a certain point of time, do people like lose that ownership of their own bodies and wishes? Well, I think it's basically the moment after their death. they lose it, really. Yeah. I mean this idea of body snatching or stealing body parts has happened to famous people throughout history. Einstein is a really good example of this. who his brain was stolen out of his head. Yeah, what was the story? Because I read Driving Mr. Albert when I was a kid and I loved it. It's a book about Einstein's brain and how it I don't know if someone had it in their trunk for a while. I don't remember, so tell me. Okay, so he was really deliberate in his instructions. He did not want to become this relic that was passed around, right? He absolutely did not want that for himself So he demanded that his entire body be cremated immediately, right? That's what Holstein wanted and his ashes scattered in a secret location as well.. But the pathologist who was on call the night that he died, a guy called Dr. Thomas Stoltz Harvey decided no, I'm going ' going to take this opportunity out. I think Einstein's wishes is less important than science So during the autopsy, he literally stole Einstein's brain. Yeah. He hid it away, He didn't have private permission from anybody. And then when the theft was noticed a few days later, How was it noticed? maybe they picked him up and were like, this feels a bit like. This head feels like. The hospital was absolutely furious, but what Harvey did was he sort of circumvented all of the bureaucrats and went directly to Einstein's son, Hans Albert and then managed to secure this sort of retrospective blessing in order to keep the brain on the condition that it could only be used for really rigorous scientific interroret. Okay, so that would have been great, you know, but Harvey was not this neuroscientist. he's not a person who knows how to do any of this stuff. And so he ended up He refused to give the brain back to anybody. He was kind of holding onto it. And then he ended up going on this completely insane forty year road trip Wh this brain was cut up into little chunks. He cut up in two hundred and forty little blocks. Ohee, and then preserved them in this really rubbery cellulose. and dividing it into different jars here and then and then put them in this wooden cider box and then put it in the trunk of his car. And then was like moving around the American Midwest, going and seeing people and being like, well, what do you think of this that was actually published on this wasn'tntil a few decades thirty years after Einstein's actual death in terms of the scientific, insights that we've got from this is almost nothing because the brain was you know, cught up in a way that wasn't usable wasn't preser wasn preserved well. Yeah. All of this stuff. So really all we know about Einstein's brain is that m s it doesn't look that different to normal brains. Yeah Golly So what he was just like driving it around to show it off to people? Was he trying to sell it or what? No, I think he knew he had this incredible scientific pleasure. And he would kind of bring it out. He would like bring it out the cupboard and show friends and you know he would mail chunks to researchers who asked for it. Right. It's all over the place now, by the way. it's not kind of united in one place. It's just do you have some of it? Would I like some of it If been secretly, yes, I would. I have to confess. I think it's incredibly disrespectful, but I probably still would quite like. Especially given that he did not want to be a relic, which is exactly what it is now. Like all these little mystical relics are now all spread out around I don't want to be a relic either. I want to be at least I want to be totally given back to the Earth. Most parts of me around for derision and jokes, but I do not want to be venerated. Yeah. Yeah, no, definitely not Definitely not. I belong to my family and the earth and that's it. Have you ever given anyone a lock of your hair? No. Although I did mention on this podcast once before that there was a point in my childhood when my sister grabbed a massive handful of my hair And my mum kept she kept it kept Yeah. Yeah yeah. So there is a lotck of my hair that exists, but no I've never given it. I think that's bluntly a little creepy. Do you? okay No, I don't have a lot of hair to give. I also never with fingernails for me, you know? What? I think fingernails and like giving someone a lock of hair, you may as well just give them a fingernail, you know? There's There's a difference though. like the hair is like now I sound like I'm some kind of hair collecting freak. I've never wanted a lock of anyone's hair nor have I Um been given any, though I do have a tiny amount of my daughter's hair from her first haircut. Her grandmother did it, and I'm like, oh, I should save this assuming that there will be someday be like a museum for my daughter and her history Um, I get I get how I mean hair is more decorative and beautiful, right? I'm trying to think of other times where there's hair. besides wigs, it feels more clean.s like it's like always dead stuff, right? Whereas like a piece of skin would be more weird a scab. A scab. My daughter's first scab. I don't have my daughter's first scab. You could do though, and she couldn't have any rights to it. You know, That's what we've learned from this episode. is Yeah. You essentially do not own any of yourself once it's not attached to your body. Once yourself is no longer attached to your body, you don't own anything. So back to our first question, who owns my baby teeth They are in my mother's home. Could I force her to give them to me legally. I don't think you could. Are you serious even though they're from me? I don't think you could. I think once they have left I mean, she owns them, right? And like I gave her permission when I was a kid to keep them and I have not asked for them back the whole time I've been an adult. if she refused to give them back to me, which she hasn't, by the way. I don't want people to think that my mom stole my teeth. but I'm just imagining that she really wanted to keep them and would not let me have them Could I say, yeah, but I grew them No My DNA was the blueprint for them I think you can. I don't think you can. I think there is not anything special about biological material that came from your body that means you have an automatic right over it which is a really strange idea to me that remains a really strange idea. Yeah But you've mixed up your daughter's teeth. know Could you do a DNA test on them? Probably. Would it be worth it H on this one belongs to a cat. Oh no, what happened? This has all been really fascinating, but in future episodes, we're going to be talking about not just owns and has rights over body parts, but who owns instructions to make body parts What's the deal with like my DNA or yours, or a gene that like I invent myself or What about an embryo