Donate Your Body to Medical Science
If you disagree with animal vivisection and prefer to support charities that practice humane medical research, one good way to help is to donate your body to medical science.
You don’t have to be sick to do this (researchers need say healthy brains to compare to brains with dementia in their research). It may sound gruesome, but it helps to prevent innocent animals being used in labs, and there’s nothing a researcher likes more than a cadaver!
Donation programs are very simple and respectful, and help to create better doctors, better treatments and more animal-free research. Here are the main places to register:
- Human Tissue Authority (HTA): They oversee body donation for research and medical teaching across England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Their site lists every medical school that accepts donations and answers common questions.
- Scottish Body Donation Programmes: In Scotland, each university medical school (Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Dundee, Glasgow, St Andrews) handles its own donations, guided by the Anatomy Act.
The paperwork is straightforward:
- Fill out a consent form. All programmes require signed consent before death.
- Notify your next of kin. Let family and your GP know about your decision.
- Send forms to your chosen medical school. Keep a copy on record with family for clarity.
Why Donate Your Body to Medical Research?
There are many still ‘incurable diseases’ like dementia, Parkinson’s, MS and motor neurone disease. But animal research is not just cruel, but also not very effective (vivisectionists have been experimenting for decades on apes to recreate HIV, and they can’t).
The best ways by far to find cures are humane methods (test tubes and modern computer chip modelling/AI methods) along with hands-on learning from donated bodies, often referred to as ‘silent teachers’. A frog may have a heart similar to humans, but it’s still a frog.
You need a human heart (and other organs) to find cures in the best and fastest way. Paramedics and military medics also use donated bodies for trauma response learning, and to learn life-saving procedures.
They can also be used to try out new devices and implants (hips, knees, heart valves) to ensure they are safe and effective before trying them out on living patients, and they can even help to study the body decomposition process, to help solve murders (by working out when victims were killed).
When you see those detective series, and Vera asks the pathologist ‘When’s your estimate of when the victim was killed’, that’s because of someone studying a dead body in a lab, years ago.
