23. Cadavers - Part 2

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Economics of Everyday Things — Episode 23: Cadavers, Part 2
Freakonomics Network | Host: Zachary Crockett | March 19, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this riveting follow-up on the cadaver trade, journalist Zachary Crockett dives into the shadowy economics of body brokering in the United States. With direct insight from Philip Guyet—a former body broker who spent over a decade in the business—this episode uncovers how human bodies move from donation to disassembly, and ultimately into the hands of researchers and corporations, all amid a startling lack of regulation.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

The Unregulated World of Body Brokering

• Lack of Credentials Required

  • Unlike tightly regulated professions, becoming a body broker requires almost no oversight or formal training.
    • Philip Guyet: “I didn’t have to have a funeral director’s license. I didn’t have to have any type of medical degree or licensing to take possession of a human body.” [01:28]
  • There exists a “not quite zero, but really close” regulatory environment. [01:59]

• Transition from Academia to Commerce

  • Academic institutions handle cadavers on a not-for-profit basis, absorbing costs related to transportation, embalming, and cremation.
  • Outside academia, directors sometimes run side hustles, selling body parts for profit:
    • “That’s kind of where I started learning about body brokers...people going to different universities offering them cash for different body parts.” [04:57]

The Marketplace for Human Remains

• Value Breakdown of Body Parts

  • Demand exists for virtually every part:
    • Whole cadavers: $5,000–$10,000
    • Severed heads: $500 each
    • Feet, spines, torsos, and individual organs all have their own price tags. [05:15]
  • Kidney, heart, and lung donations for transplants are strictly regulated, but research-use donations are not:
    • “There’s very little screening, if any, and no one ever questions the people actually purchasing the bodies.” [06:38]

• Acquiring Donors

  • Brokers network extensively in hospices and end-of-life facilities, sometimes incentivizing staff with gifts and raffles:
    • “You give gifts, you do raffles, you know, you do nice things. And then they’re going to talk to the family.” [07:06]
  • Free cremation is offered to families, making body donation an attractive option, especially for those with limited means:
    • “We’ve always been looked at as like preying on the poor, but it’s another option. It’s gotten too expensive to die.” [07:47]

• Consent and Transparency Issues

  • Consent forms often lack specificity about what “research” entails, leading many families to misunderstand the fate of their loved ones:
    • “I think a lot of families are fooled by some of the propaganda...they show research as, you know, someone in a lab coat looking at a slide, where in reality they’re going to cut the head off, cut the spine out...” [08:26]

• Technical Process

  • Guyet describes how bodies are dismembered with Home Depot tools, double-bagged, tagged, and stored in chest freezers until orders come in:
    • “They’re not paying for expertise...we use Home Depot tools, you know, stuff like that, because nothing really had to be sterile.” [08:54]

Who Buys Human Body Parts?

• Corporate and Medical Interests

  • Major buyers include medical device companies (e.g., 3M, Johnson & Johnson, Stryker) for product testing at conventions and workshops:
    • “Maybe there’s a surgical instrument company hosting a workshop in Las Vegas...They need 250 heads for rhinoplasty lectures. I’m getting paid $500 per head.” [12:00]
  • Body donation companies also conduct their own workshops in private facilities. [12:20]

• Other Markets

  • Law enforcement uses remains for cadaver dog training, and there are specialized requests for organs and tissues in various conditions. Some cases, however, veer into the bizarre and disturbing:
    • “There were plenty of requests for different organs...I never recovered any penises because what ended up having to go wrong with another group out of Arizona?” [12:44]

Logistics and Side Business

• Shipping and Handling
  • Remains are shipped like everyday products, packed in coolers with dry ice via FedEx. [13:21]
• Metals and Dental Gold
  • Post-cremation, Guyet also profited by salvaging metals from implants and dental gold, earning up to $500,000 a year:
    • “The whole human body just ends up being a fricking commodity. Is it wrong? Is it right? I don’t know. But there’s a lot of ridiculous money in businesses like this.” [13:56]

Scandals and Legal Fallout

• Recent Controversies

  • High-profile incidents include the Harvard body donor program indictment and multimillion-dollar lawsuit settlements over fraudulent or unethical practices. [14:26]
  • Funeral homes have been caught selling body parts instead of providing promised cremation services.

• Ethical Failings and Admission

  • Sometimes, families receive only a fraction of a loved one’s remains—sometimes replaced with cat litter to mask the shortfall:
    • “Sometimes these bodies would be taken apart so much where there’s only, like, a rib cage left. The family only gets maybe a pound or a pound and a half worth of ashes back.” [15:27]

• Guyet’s Downfall

  • Guyet himself was convicted after selling tissue for live transplants and falsifying records, endangering over 120 patients and serving eight years for wire fraud:
    • “No one ever looks at my case and says, you know what? Maybe I shouldn’t get into this business. Everyone else just thinks they can do it better.” [16:43]

The State of Regulation and Reflection

• Proposed Legislative Changes

  • Congress is considering regulations to require registration, standardize labeling/packaging, and enforce proper disposal—but the profitable industry is likely to endure. [17:04]

• Guyet’s Reflections

  • Now out of prison and back to land surveying, he wryly notes his ability to return to the trade if he so chooses:
    • “If I wanted to get back in the business, I surely could.” [18:05]
  • On learning new skills in prison: “In prison, I learned about options trading from all the white collar guys. So, yeah, without a dead body, I do fine.” [17:41]
  • The episode closes with Guyet’s own summary: “Kind of a bummer, isn’t it?” [18:32]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “I could take a person apart within 15 minutes, you know, bag it and put it in the freezer and it’s ready to go.” — Philip Guyet [01:28]
• “Everything gets double bagged. It gets given an ID number and then placed into a chest freezer...orders are filled once you acquire a certain number...” — Philip Guyet [08:54]
• “The whole human body just ends up being a fricking commodity.” — Philip Guyet [13:56]
• “Sometimes these bodies would be taken apart so much where there’s only, like, a rib cage left....So there’s plenty of opportunities for people to be lazy, unethical, stupid.” — Philip Guyet [15:27]
• “No one ever looks at my case and says, you know what? Maybe I shouldn’t get into this business. Everyone else just thinks they can do it better.” — Philip Guyet [16:43]
• “Kind of a bummer, isn’t it?” — Philip Guyet [18:32]

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Important Timestamps

• [01:28] — The lack of regulation in body brokering
• [04:57] — Discovery of body brokers’ lucrative side hustles
• [05:15/05:48] — Pricing breakdown for human bodies
• [06:38] — Minimal screening and oversight
• [07:47] — How cost drives low-income families to donate
• [08:26] — Misleading consent forms
• [08:54] — The hands-on process and “tools from Home Depot”
• [12:00] — Medical conventions and corporate buyers
• [13:56] — Making a fortune from hip implants and dental gold
• [14:26] — Recent legal scandals in the industry
• [16:43] — Guyet’s conviction and industry’s persistent allure
• [18:05] — Possibility of returning to body brokering

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Tone and Style

The episode blends Crockett’s measured, factual narration with Guyet’s frank and, at times, darkly humorous insights, offering a rare inside look at a “business” that is both necessary for medical advancement—and rife with ethical peril.

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For further details, listen to the full episode or explore additional resources on body donation ethics and regulation.

Transcript

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[Zachary Crockett]

In America, lots of jobs require some kind of credential. Want to be a lawyer? You'll need a license. Dentist license, electrician, accountant, taxi driver license. But if you want to chop up human bodies and sell them to researchers and pharmaceutical companies, I could take a

[Philip Guyet]

person apart within 15 minutes, you know, bag it and put in the freezer and it's ready to go. I didn't have to have a funeral director's license. I didn't have to have any type of medical degree or licensing to take possession of a human body. Many times I would be told, are you a doctor? I go, no. I don't want to say there's zero regulation, but yeah, but there is really no regulation

[Zachary Crockett]

for the Freakonomics radio network. This is the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett. Today Cadavers Part 2. In the first part of this series, we talked about the troubling history of cadavers in the United States. How medical school anatomy labs used to obtain bodies from murders and grave robbers. Those practices ended when the laws were changed to allow people like you and me to donate our bodies to science. These days, around 20,000Americans do that every year. Some of those bodies are donated directly to medical schools. Others go to for profit companies that sell human body parts with very few legal restrictions. Not much is known about how these so called body brokers do business. So today we're gonna hear from a man who spent more than a decade in the trade.

[Philip Guyet]

My name is Philip Guyet. I got into the body parts business back in like 1993, and yeah, and it's just kind of, I don't know if you could say spiraled or went up from there.

[Zachary Crockett]

In the early 1990s, Guyette was working as a land surveyor when he injured his back. He needed to find a job that was less physically demanding. An acquaintance told him about a medical school in Southern California that needed help sourcing cadavers for its anatomy classes.

[Philip Guyet]

I've gone deer hunting, so I'm used to seeing things dead, but that was my first experience with dead bodies, human bodies.

[Zachary Crockett]

The university where Guyet went to work had 250 students in anatomy classes. In a typical year, they needed around 80 cadavers for study. They didn't have many donors, so Gaet had to network with larger schools and scrounge around for any excess cadavers they had in storage.

[Philip Guyet]

I started visiting all the other medical schools in the Southern California area. You know, ucla, usc, UC San Diego, UC Irvine. A lot of schools would only take cases if the place of death was 50 miles or less from their institution. So I would start getting referrals and then started growing our program.

[Zachary Crockett]

For academic institutions, cadavers are strictly a not for profit undertaking. The donor doesn't get paid, and the school will typically cover the fees for transportation, embalming, cremation, and paperwork. That usually adds up to a few thousand dollars, a small fraction of a med student's tuition. But while Guyet was sourcing cadavers for that Southern California university, he noticed that some of the directors of the donor programs he worked with had side hustles. And that's where the real money was.

[Philip Guyet]

We got some cadavers from usc. Their coordinator rolled up in a three piece suit in Alexis. And you know, this guy had the same job I had. And that's kind of where I started learning about these body brokers. You know, people going to different universities offering them cash for different body parts.

[Zachary Crockett]

Guyet learned that there is a huge demand for cadavers outside of anatomy classrooms. Researchers and medical device companies are willing to pay top dollar for certain body parts split up into pieces. A cadaver can collectively fetch 5,000 to $10,000. A severed head, for instance, can be sold for $500 a foot, 350 a spine, 300 torsos, elbow and knee joints, brains. There's a need for just about anything

[Philip Guyet]

on the limbs, extremities, head, spine, hips, stuff like that. You should be able to make about $5,000. You're going to add about another two to $3,000 in organ research. Tissue. So segments of the brain, parietal, lo, lobe, occipital lobe, pieces of heart, lung, and then on top of that, there's just normal control tissue they need for their research.

[Zachary Crockett]

Now, as a reminder, live organ and tissue donation are heavily regulated by federal agencies. Before a heart or a lung or a cornea is transplanted into a living patient's body, it goes through an extensive health screening process. But as Guyet learned, if a body part is being used strictly for research, none of those regulations apply.

[Philip Guyet]

There's very little screening, if any, and no one ever questions the people actually purchasing the bodies.

[Zachary Crockett]

In the early 2000s, Guyet left his university job and started a body donation firm in Las Vegas to find donors. He ran ads in the obituary sections of local newspapers and struck up relationships with workers in end of life facilities.

[Philip Guyet]

I'd say 90% of the donors are 65 years of age or older. And so you work with hospices, you work with the head nurse and many hospitals because that's where people die. You give gifts, you do raffles, you know, you do nice things. And then they're going to talk to the family.

[Zachary Crockett]

Some body brokers will pay funeral homes referral fees for convincing families to donate their loved ones bodies. They'll also sweeten the deal by offering donors free cremation. Any remains not sold to researchers are incinerated at no cost and returned to family members. This incentive is especially attractive to low income Americans.

[Philip Guyet]

The average cremation right now in the US is about $2,000. We've always been looked at as like preying on the poor, but it's another option. You know, it's gotten too expensive to die. Sometimes the family will say, oh God, this came at a terrible time. No one has money, my husband just lost a job, stuff like that. And then that kind of gives an opening. So that's kind of how those conversations start.

[Zachary Crockett]

Consent forms can be pretty vague. They typically specify that a body will be used for research, but don't usually spell out in clear terms that a body might be chopped up and sold to multiple entities.

[Philip Guyet]

I think a lot of families are fooled by some of the propaganda on these websites because they show research as, you know, someone in a lab coat looking at a slide where in reality they're going to cut the head off, cut the spine out, or stuff like that.

[Zachary Crockett]

Guyet, who again had no formal training of any kind, was the one doing all that chopping up. And he found that researchers did not seem to care much about precision.

[Philip Guyet]

They're not paying for expertise, they're not paying for a fine cut. You know, we use Home Depot tools, you know, stuff like that, because nothing really had to be sterile. Everything gets doubled bagged. It gets given an ID number and then placed into a chest freezer and gets frozen fresh and then orders are filled once you acquire a certain number shoulders, knees, hips, foot and ankle or whole extremities.

[Zachary Crockett]

So who exactly was buying all of these body parts? That's coming up. The Economics of Everyday Things is sponsored by crowdstreet. You're the kind of person who reads the fine print, who likes to make your own calls, who's built a life, not to mention a career, by thinking independently. So why shouldn't you invest that way too? Crowdstreet is built for self directed investors who want direct access to private market opportunities like private equity, private credit and real estate. Vetted offerings, transparent data and clear diligence summaries help you make confident, informed choices. Because independence doesn't stop at your desk or your business or your weekend projects, it should extend to your investments too. Invest the way you live independently. Learn [e-mail].

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[Zachary Crockett]

After Philip Guyet obtained each cadaver, cut it into pieces with tools from Home Depot, double bagged the parts and put them in his freezer. Who did he sell them to? The biggest buyers are medical equipment manufacturers like 3M, Johnson Johnson and Stryker. When those companies develop a new tool, they'll set up workshops in hotel ballrooms, at medical conventions where surgeons can test them out on real human body parts.

[Philip Guyet]

Maybe there's a surgical instrument company that is hosting a workshop in Las Vegas. And they need 250 heads for the rhinoplasty lectures. I'm getting paid $500 per head, plus another $5,000 per day setting everything up.

[Zachary Crockett]

These conventions are lucrative, and the biggest body donation companies like ScienceCare, who we talked to in part one, even put on their own workshops.

[Philip Guyet]

They've opened up their own auditoriums and their own teaching facilities so they can keep everything in house now instead of going to Caesar's Palace.

[Zachary Crockett]

But conventions aren't the only market for human bodies.

[Philip Guyet]

Cadaver dog training courses. Yeah, they would want organ and bone tissue. Just different types of tissue in different stages of decomposition. There were plenty of requests for different organs. You know, testicles, penises, stuff like that. I never recovered any penises because what ended up having to go wrong with another group out of Arizona? When they raided his place, they found a bucket full of penises. And, you know, the question was, why do you have them? My question, when I was asked for an interview on the case, I said, well, who requested them?

[Zachary Crockett]

Regardless of where Guyette found a willing buyer, he would ship body parts just like any other product, using carriers like FedEx.

[Philip Guyet]

I would go to places like Costco or Sam's Club, and I'd buy the big 100 quart coolers because, you know, they're hard shelled. You can place those things in frozen, and they're not going to defrost in an overnight shipment. Or you can pack them with dry ice.

[Zachary Crockett]

The money didn't stop with the bodies themselves. Guyet noticed that during cremation, there would often be metals left behind. The funeral homes would typically throw them away. But he saw a business opportunity.

[Philip Guyet]

I was making 350 to $500,000 a year recycling Hipponian plants because it's all cobalt and titanium. I was making about 25,000 to $50,000 a month on dental gold. The whole human body just ends up being a fricking commodity. Is it wrong? Is it right? I don't know. But there's a lot of ridiculous money in businesses like this. People don't know about it until something happens

[Zachary Crockett]

by something. Guyet means a controversy. And there has been no shortage of them in the world of body brokering. In June of this year, the director of Harvard's body donation program was indicted for selling body parts of cadavers donated to the university. One client allegedly purchased two dissected faces for $600 and used them to make dolls with human skin. In Phoenix, a body donation firm was accused of lying to family members about how Donors bodies would be used. A civil lawsuit resulted in a $58 million settlement. And in Colorado, two funeral home directors were charged with selling tissue from people who'd paid for cremation services.

[Philip Guyet]

You have a funeral home that told the family that they're cremated in the body, but they're dismembering it and selling it to different institutions.

[Zachary Crockett]

Guyet says that in some cases, the donor's cremated remains are not as complete as the family expects.

[Philip Guyet]

Sometimes these bodies would be taken apart so much where there's only, like, a rib cage left, the family only gets maybe a pound or a pound and a half worth of ashes back. And that's where people can start doing stupid things like putting in cat litter or putting in something else that isn't the body. So there's plenty of opportunities for people to be lazy, unethical, stupid.

[Zachary Crockett]

Guyet took some of those opportunities himself. In 2006, after he'd moved his operation to North Carolina, he came home to a media frenzy.

[Philip Guyet]

At his door, I saw, like, seven news vans parked around my house. And that was when I knew that, yeah, things were not going to go my way.

[Zachary Crockett]

Guyet had been selling tissue for live transplants alongside body parts for research, and he had altered medical information to pass off diseased samples as healthy ones. Prosecutors later said that more than 120 patients received this tissue, exposing them to potentially deadly risks. Gaet was found guilty of a wire fraud and was sentenced to eight years in federal prison.

[Philip Guyet]

Prison sucks. You lose your family, you lose a lot of stuff, you lose your livelihood. But no one ever looks at my case and says, you know what? Maybe I shouldn't get into this business. Everyone else just thinks they can do it better.

[Zachary Crockett]

What about the people you affected?

[Philip Guyet]

It is completely my fault for what I did. None of us did our due diligence.

[Zachary Crockett]

Congress is currently considering a bill that would require body brokers to register with the federal government and follow rules about labeling, packaging, and disposing of human remains. It might prevent cadaver dealers from playing fast and loose with donations, but it wouldn't eliminate the industry. Researchers and educators need human bodies, and that means there's money to be made supplying them. Today, Guyet is a free man. He's living in California and back to working his old job as a land surveyor.

[Philip Guyet]

In prison, I learned about options trading from all the white collar guys. So, yeah, without a dead body, I do fine.

[Zachary Crockett]

But at least for now, nothing is preventing him from buying a few tools from Home Depot, soliciting some body donors, and picking up where he left off.

[Philip Guyet]

If I wanted to get back in the business, I surely could.

[Zachary Crockett]

For the economics of everyday things, I'm Zachary Crockett. This episode was produced by Sarah Lilly and mixed by Jeremy Johnston. We had help from Lyric Bowdich and Daniel Moritz Rapson.

[Philip Guyet]

Kind of a bummer, isn't it?

[Zachary Crockett]

The Freakonomics Radio Network the Hidden side of Everything

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