Accusations Made Against Chinese Biotechnology Company for Engaging in Illegal Human Cadaver Trade
A leaked court document revealed that thousands of human bodies were illicitly obtained from funeral homes, a medical lab, and a top hospital.
A Chinese biomaterial firm is facing accusations of participating in an eight-year scheme involving the trading of stolen cadavers, as per the leaked court document.
Between January 2015 and July 2023, Shanxi Osteorad Biomaterial Co., previously a state-owned company, and an affiliated firm, allegedly acquired over 4,300 human cadavers from various funeral homes, a transplant center, and a medical university, for the purpose of producing bone grafting materials.
According to the document, the company supplied allogeneic bone implantable materials to hospitals across 13 provinces and cities.
The leaked prosecution document, dated May 23, was initially shared on Chinese social media platform Weibo on Aug. 8 by Yi Shenghua, a Beijing lawyer with close to 2.8 million followers.
Yi informed Chinese state-backed media outlet The Paper on Thursday that he was not directly involved in the case and had obtained the document from a source with knowledge of the situation.
Law enforcement officials had reportedly seized over 18 metric tons of raw and semi-finished material and 34,077 units of finished product from the companies involved, as outlined in the document.
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“This situation is incredibly unusual. Even if the cadavers were sourced from organ donors, Li had no authority to determine their usage as they belonged to the deceased’s families,” Tang remarked to the Chinese edition of NTD News.“Furthermore, Li dismembered the bodies, stored body parts, and illicitly sold them without the families’ knowledge. The circumstances surrounding these bodies and their deaths are suspicious. How did these individuals pass away? Why were there no family members claiming the bodies?” Tang inquired.
Tang expressed his belief that the case shed light on a prevailing system of cadaver trading in China and a shadow economy endorsed by the Chinese Communist Party, which treats individuals as commodities for profit, whether alive or deceased.
As per the court document, Li Baoxing, the head of Shanxi Osteorad, instructed four senior managers to fabricate consent forms and quality control reports, with a majority of the company’s staff forging signatures of donors’ families.
Following Yi’s circulation of the document on Weibo, several Chinese media outlets covered the story, though the reports and some of Yi’s Weibo posts are no longer visible.
Allogeneic grafting involves the use of a human donor’s bone for bone grafting. Other forms of bone grafting include autografts and xenogeneic bone grafts, as well as synthetic bone graft materials.
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