Modern Day Body Snatchers
Posted by: Linda Chalat
October 31, 2006

On February 23, 2006 in Brooklyn State Supreme Court, four men were arraigned on a series of charges reading like Robert Louis Stevenson's saga The Body Snatchers. Prosecutors claimed that the men, who worked for a company called Biomedical Tissue Services, had engaged in a modern form of body-snatching. A ghoulish ring trafficking in bones, tissue and other body parts illicitly harvested from corpses at funeral homes throughout New York City potentially raked in millions of dollars selling tendons and ligaments for surgical replacement and bone for dental implants and orthopedic reconstruction procedures, sources familiar with the investigation said.

Continue Reading

....very, very dreadfully nervous
Posted by: Linda Chalat
October 18, 2006

Caveat emptor that cadaver! A Connecticut Superior Court judge has ruled in favor of a business accused of providing a defective heart valve for transplantation, saying that such human tissue is not a product for the purposes of a product liability claim. The issue of whether to consider processed tissue a product has been addressed by only a handful of opinions—including a California case and a federal court interpreting Utah law and all have held as the Connecticut court did.

Continue Reading