The use of unclaimed bodies for medical study is examined in the series Dealing the Dead, which includes this article.
Four months after an NBC News investigation revealed that the University of North Texas Health Science Center had neglected to notify families prior to utilizing their loved ones’ corpses for medical research, the center’s president is resigning.
The University of North Texas System Board of Regents announced Monday that Sylvia Trent-Adams’ resignation had been accepted. The three-paragraph statement, which commended Trent-Adams’ commitment, moral character, and decency, omitted any reference to NBC News coverage or provided an explanation for her resignation.
Messages requesting comment from Trent-Adams and a Health Science Center spokesman were not answered.
The first part of a year-long investigation into the Fort Worth-based Health Science Center’s practice of dissecting, analyzing, and renting out the bodies of unclaimed dead people whose relatives cannot afford cremation or burial, or whose family members are frequently difficult to contact, was released by NBC News in September.
Over the course of five years, the center received roughly 2,350 unclaimed bodies from Tarrant and Dallas counties. Many of these were used to train medical students, while others were dissected and leased to outside organizations, such as the U.S. Army and major biotech companies, which helped the center earn roughly $2.5 million annually. This was carried out without the deceased’s permission and frequently without any of their survivors’ awareness.
The Health Science Center said that it was suspending its body donation program, removing the people who oversaw it, and engaging a consulting firm to examine the program’s operations just days before the NBC News story was released.
Trent-Adams wrote in emails to professors and students that the reporting had shown insufficient management and controls of the center’s Willed Body Program, which had failed to meet our expectations for professionalism, care, and respect. For instance, she alleged that center administration was not aware that the body program was frequently transporting unclaimed remains—including those of US military veterans—across state boundaries.
According to emails retrieved after a public records request, Trent-Adams received several messages from worried students, employees, and alumni in the days that followed. A medical student at the Health Science Center stated in one message that although they had been taught that consent is fundamental to medical practice, NBC News reporting had raised concerns about whether the management was actually implementing this in our academic anatomy lab.
Another student wrote to Trent-Adams, “The idea that we dissected bodies without consent makes me sick to my stomach.” Because we believed they were donors rather than impoverished people with no voice, we called them that.
NBC News was able to swiftly track down a number of families who were upset and devastated to discover from reporters that their loved ones had been dissected and examined without their consent, despite the fact that many of the people whose bodies were used by the Health Science Center were said to have no next of kin. More survivors came forward when the news source revealed the names of hundreds of victims whose unclaimed bodies were transferred to the site in October. Reporters have discovered over 25 families who discovered that a member had been utilized for study weeks, months, or even years later.
The Health Science Center said in a statement in September that administrators were reaching out to families to offer our sincere apologies as more survivors came forward.
Among those looking for answers was Abigail Willson. She found out about her mother’s passing and her gift to the Health Science Center through the NBC News list. According to Willson, a staff worker informed her and her family that Trent-Adams wanted to meet with them when they visited the center in October to get more information.
According to Willson, we sat there for forty-five minutes and the university president never arrived. They then gave her our information, but she never gave us a call.
When the Texas Funeral Service Commission sent Trent-Adams a letter in November directing the facility to immediately stop the practice of liquefying bodies—which the commission claimed was illegal under state law—the fallout intensified. The institution claimed to have ceased the procedure on the day NBC News released its report in September, but it maintained that the so-called water cremation was still lawful.
Three years prior to Trent-Adams’ appointment as president after a military career, the Health Science Center had been receiving unclaimed bodies since at least 2019. She was the acting U.S. surgeon general during the first term of President Donald Trump.
On January 31, she will leave the Health Science Center.