42. The Skeleton Business's Murderous Legacy

Scott Carney Investigates

At its height, the bone factories in Calcutta exported more than 60,000 anatomical skeletons a year to medical programs all over the world. Most of the bones had been looted from graves and burning ghats. Still, anatomy processors made millions of dollars stealing and then exporting those bodies abroad. Today, those hundreds of tons of human remains are in closets and specimine collections all around American and Europe...and now we need to decide what to do with them. Today my guest is Sabrina Agarwal a professor and the chair of the department of anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley who specializes in bioarchaeology. She just wrote an article in Nature digging into the ethical dilemma we all face when thinking about how to deal with the legacy of the skeleton trade. "The bioethics of skeletal anatomy collections from India" in Nature

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