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There aren’t enough bodies to go around for everyone who needs a steady supply of cadavers for training and experiments. That shortage is helping turn the process of procuring cadavers into a functioning market, says a Harvard professor.

Most cadavers are obtained through medical-school programs that allow people to donate their body to science. But as demand has grown, other suppliers have become “a growing presence in the U.S. commerce for cadavers,” according to a paper by Michel Anteby of the Harvard Business School.

“These actors are legal entrepreneurial ventures that have been operating for more than a decade in the United States; they cater to domestic users and international ones alike,” writes Anteby, whose paper appears in HBS Working Knowledge and Economic Sociology:The European Electronic Newsletter.

The business of supplying cadavers has market-like characteristics, but isn’t a typical market. For one thing, it’s basically illegal in the U.S. to buy and sell cadavers. But, Anteby explains, reimbursing suppliers for the cost of their services involved with providing bodies is OK.

In a conversation with the Health Blog, Anteby said there’s fragmentary evidence that middlemen not connected with medical schools are attracting “several thousand” cadavers a year, out of a total of perhaps 20,000 cadavers donated every year in the U.S. Hard data on cadaver costs are also scare, but estimates of $4,000 to $5,000 each seem about right, he says.

With participants in the cadaver world preferring to stay out of the limelight, more research into the field is needed, particularly as supplying demand takes on more market-driven dynamics, Anteby says. He told the Health Blog that obtaining cadavers is “such an important endeavor” for training and research that it’s vital to shed more light on the field.

Image: iStockphoto

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Anatomy of a Market: Shedding Light on Cadaver Commerce