Texas lawmaker vows to ban medical research on unclaimed bodies after NBC News investigation

This article is part of “Dealing the Dead,” a series investigating the use of unclaimed bodies for medical research.

A Texas state legislator is vowing to ban the use of unclaimed bodies for research in response to an NBC News investigation that found a local medical program obtained and studied hundreds of human specimens without families’ permission.

Sen. Tan Parker, a Republican whose district includes portions of Dallas and Tarrant counties, said he would introduce a bill in the legislative session in January to prohibit the use of people’s bodies unless they or their survivors give full consent.

Parker has sought in the past to crack down on the largely unregulated body broker industry. Still, he said he had no idea before seeing NBC News’ investigation that the Fort Worth-based University of North Texas Health Science Center had made money off of unclaimed bodies by dissecting them and leasing the parts to for-profit medical companies and other institutions, including the Army. Some of the people whose remains were used this way had families who were searching for them.

“I was outraged and completely just disgusted to see what had been occurring,” said Parker, noting that he fully supports the use of bodies to advance medicine, but only when the dead or their families give permission. “Human life is sacred and needs to always be protected, and that is a core principle to me.”

The Health Science Center did not comment on Parker’s plans for legislation. In a statement Thursday, university spokesperson Andy North said the center “fell short of the standards of respect, care and professionalism that we demand.”

A half-century ago, U.S. medical schools routinely used unclaimed bodies for research and training, and doing so remains legal in most of the country, including Texas. But some states — and many body-donation programs — have halted the practice to reflect changes in medical ethics that demand doctors and scientists handle bodies with the same respect shown to living patients.

Officials in North Texas justified sending unclaimed bodies — those without families who could afford to make funeral arrangements or whose families could not be reached — to the Health Science Center by saying the deals saved local governments on burial and cremation costs, helped train physicians and aided lifesaving research. However, NBC News found repeated failures by death investigators in Dallas and Tarrant counties and by the Health Science Center to contact relatives who were reachable before declaring the bodies unclaimed.

The reporting prompted immediate changes, along with public outrage and shocked responses from federal, state and local government officials. The Health Science Center suspended its body-donation program, fired the officials who led it and said it would stop accepting unclaimed bodies. Some medical device and research companies, as well as the Army, said they were rethinking their arrangements with the center and planned to examine their own internal policies to ensure they don’t use unclaimed bodies in the future.

Alisa Simmons, a member of the Tarrant County Commissioners Court, said she will push the board to adopt new policies to ensure the ethical and respectful treatment of the unclaimed dead. Dallas County officials have said moving forward they won’t provide unclaimed bodies for research unless survivors choose to do so.

For some families, those promises have helped soothe their pain, but they said they remain traumatized by what happened to their dead relatives.

“It infuriates me, the total disrespect,” said Brenda Cloud, sister of Victor Honey.

Honey, 58, a homeless Army veteran with mental illness, was dissected and leased to two medical companies and the Army after his death in 2022. His family members did not know until NBC News informed them this spring. In June, they buried Honey’s cremated remains at the Dallas-Fort Worth National Cemetery, among thousands of other military service members.

Cloud said she feels some relief knowing that the Health Science Center has stopped obtaining unclaimed bodies, but she wants more to be done to prevent others from going through what her family endured.

“Now that people have an awareness of what’s going on, we can look at laws being changed,” Cloud said. “Still, there is no law, nothing, that will fix what happened.”

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, which helped arrange Honey’s June burial, expressed sympathy for what happened to him.

“We were extremely saddened to hear of his and his family’s story,” Terrence Hayes, a VA spokesperson, said in a statement. “Mr. Honey, like all Veterans who have served our nation with courage and honor, deserved a dignified burial at the time of his passing.”

The Rev. Al Sharpton, who hosts MSNBC’s “PoliticsNation” and has previously condemned failures by Mississippi officials to notify families before declaring bodies unclaimed, said the Health Science Center’s activities were “a civil rights issue” that deserved government intervention.

“What you’re doing is robbing their families and loved ones and the person of their human dignity and of their rights to make a decision over their loved ones,” Sharpton said in an interview.

Some officials and medical experts reacted to NBC News’ findings by calling for federal changes. Thomas Champney, an anatomy professor at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine who researches the ethical use of human bodies, said he hoped Congress would take action.

“This should not occur anywhere within the United States,” Champney said.

Eli Shupe, a bioethicist at the University of Texas at Arlington who for years tried unsuccessfully to dissuade Tarrant County officials from providing unclaimed bodies to the University of North Texas Health Science Center, said her state now has an opportunity to set a new national standard.

“This isn’t just a good step forward for Texas, but it could be a model for other medical schools, other counties, other states,” Shupe said, referring to Parker’s promise to end the use of unclaimed bodies.

Louisa Harvey, whose fiancé, Michael Coleman, 43, was sent to the Health Science Center even as she reported him missing and searched for him, said she was glad to see the cascade of changes and promises of reforms.

“There’s no justice for Michael or the families that have already been affected, but it’s a good thing if it can keep it from happening to anyone else,” Harvey said.

Harvey said she wanted more from the Health Science Center, whose officials apologized for the program’s failures in a statement posted to its website but hadn’t spoken to Coleman’s or Honey’s loved ones.

“That sounds like something you say just because you got caught,” Harvey said of the center’s statement.

After NBC News shared Harvey’s comments, North, the Health Science Center spokesperson, said officials had been “working to connect with families to extend our deepest apologies.”

In the meantime, Harvey said she’s been haunted by nightmares for months and still has no confidence that the box on her nightstand actually contains Coleman’s ashes.