Do You Own Your Own Foot?

Hello, welcome to the Best of Science. I'm Hannah Fry. And I'm Michael Stevens. We're starting today, Michael. Have you held on to any body parts? You know, children's teeth, for example, would be the normal one. My daughter hasn't lost teeth yet, but my mother still has all of my baby teeth. Right. In a little container in her cabinet, in her kitchen. That's... I'm somewhere between adorable and creepy. I know, right? But it's not creepy. I have kept all of my daughter's teeth, actually. Yeah. And I'm not sure which one's which. Oh, because you've got multiple... Multiple daughters. But don't you have separate containers for them? I probably should have done that. Because my mom has kept mine and my sister's teeth, like, labeled. Oh, that's... Now, I only have one child. So when I look and I find an old dried up piece of a milky cord, I know that it's hers. But I've kept that. I've kept cuttings from my daughter's first haircut. Oh, you know what? This isn't a body part, but I kept a bandage from my cat. Because when I took the bandage off, the blood stain on it was a perfect heart shape. I mean, perfect, like uncanny. I'll have to show you a photo later. If I can find one, we'll put it in the episode. I was just using some industry terms. But that's it. Oh, and of course, my bag of beard hair. Wait, tell me that you did not bring your bag of beard hair with you. I didn't bring my bag of beard hair, but I once shaved my beard off for charity. And there was way more beard hair than like we could in good conscience give a person. So, but I kept the rest of it because I'm like, my beard won't be this color forever. It's turning gray. So I should keep some samples from before it turned gray. And I've just got a little ziplock bag of it pinned onto my pegboard as like a memory. OK. I mean, if you think that's getting towards creepy, you're not alone. But also just you wait until what we've got lined up in this episode. I was talking to the list of rather than you. No, Michael, that's perfectly normal, keeping hold of all of that stuff. Thank you. It is interesting that your mum has still got your teeth because aren't they yours? That's right. They're not hers. Does she own them? I mean, she'd give them to me if I asked, but could she sell them? Or do you own them? Do you even have rights to them? I mean, they've left your body. Yeah. What if she refused to give them back? What a judge. Compel her to those other kind of questions that we're going to be answering today, specifically about body parts. But we've got a bit of a sort of demi series that is loosely themed around this idea of what part of yourself do you have rights to? What part of yourself do you own? And what parts of others do you have rights to? And what parts of things that aren't even on earth can you own? Pretty exciting stuff. Pretty exciting stuff. We're going to start with body parts today. Starting with body parts today. Absolutely. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Here's something strange. Your DNA contains more ancient viral fragments than genes. The genes that build our cells make up only 2% of our DNA. And for years, that is what scientists focused on. They treated the rest, the ancient viruses and stuff as junk. But now we know that that hidden majority, sometimes called the dark genome, influences how our biology works and how diseases like cancer behave. It's a reminder that progress rarely comes as a single breakthrough. It builds gradually. Cancer Research UK plays a central role in that progress, supporting decades of research into over 200 types of cancer, work that's helped double survival in the UK over the past 50 years. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash the rest is science. Instagram teen accounts with automatic protections on who can contact teenagers and the content they can see. Instagram teen accounts have contact limits on by default. So teenagers get messages from people they know. Not strangers and default content settings. Plus teenagers under 16 can't change these default settings without parental approval, so parents can help teenagers connect safely. Learn more at instagram.com slash teen accounts. My teeth fell out when I was a kid on their own natural accord. But if I got like an arm amputated, what happens to the arm? So I think this it's kind of up to you. So you can just leave it at the hospital. They can incinerate it, you know, with all of the other things that they cut off and out of people. A lot of medical tissue does end up going down that route. Yeah. But you can, if you want to, you can ask for it. You can say I want to keep. Are there, I'm sure there are conditions. This, by the way, in the UK is regulated by the Human Tissue Authority. OK, I think the US has something very simple. Absolutely. And they say you are legally free to do anything with an amputated limb provided it isn't a public health risk. Exactly. Right. I couldn't keep my amputated arm in order to freak out my neighbor or let it sit there and decay and mold and then spread disease. Yeah. But could I have someone taxidermy it? You could have somebody taxidermy it if you wanted. You can, I mean, you can go more imaginative than this, by the way, you can accelerate the process of removing the tissue from the bones. And then you can do whatever you want with it, including scaring your neighbors. So there's a real. OK, so as long as it's just like a dry bone that isn't a health risk, even if it's a mental health risk, because if I opened my door and my neighbor's bones were on my front porch, I might be like, yum. Or you might find it quite funny. Yeah, right. It depends on the way that they. The way that they. There's got to be like some public decency laws around this. I'm not sure there are, you know, because OK, so there's one amazing story that I found. This is Christy Loyle from Oklahoma. So she had cancer, this really this really rare type of it's called epitheloid sarcoma. And it's the soft tissue cancer. So she had to have her leg amputated. This is in 2011. And so what she did, she took her amputated leg that sort of foot and like the just above the ankle. And she took it to a company called Skulls Unlimited. Right. I wonder if you can guess what they do. They use flesh eating beetles to strip it down. So she fed some beetles. She fed some beetles. And then she's got this like fully articulated skeleton foot that was part of her body and she posts pictures of it Instagram. And they are amazing, these pictures. And they're very, very funny. Can I show you? Yeah, please. OK. So does she pose it? She does. Like here it is kicking a soccer ball. Yeah, absolutely. Here's here's a couple of them. You want to describe some of these? So one is a photograph of it looks like it's the bones of her foot on one side. And then next to it is a living human foot. I'm assuming her remaining foot in a sock that's designed to look like the bones of the foot. Oh, now here. So she's got her leg going down into sand. Yeah, she's lying on a beach. She's lying on a beach and her leg like kind of below the knee is under the sand. But then poking up a little further on are the bones of her foot. Where they ordinarily would where they ordinarily would be. Oh, and here is her foot and ankle skeleton inside a transparent shoe. So you can look through the shoe material and see that there's bones inside. That's it's amazing how different it is psychologically to see a like plastic foot skeleton versus a real one. Knowing that it really came from a person because I don't know what my bones look like. I've never seen them, but they're in there. They have been me. Of course, they've changed over time, but they've been with me forever. Like I owe so much to them. And yet I don't even I wouldn't recognize them if I saw them on the street. No, no. And this idea of the psychology of it, I think when it comes to people who go through amputations, amputation can really trigger this profound sense of grief in people. You know, it's a trauma that's sort of comparable to the bereavement of a loved one in a lot of ways. And there are some studies that say if you have control over the just over what happens to your limb, then actually it's much easier to have this sort of positive experience. I mean, you never really can have that much of a positive experience if you're going through an amputation, but it helps you kind of grieve the passing of your limb. Oh, for sure. I can totally see that. I can see how some people might grieve better if they just never see it again. Yeah. But if someone wants to have a funeral for their amputated hand, let them, right? Yeah. Yeah. Um, and if you don't want to have a funeral where you are bearing it in your garden, you know, or having a bonfire or whatever it might be, if there's something a bit grotesque about you, you burning your own limb, there is now a, uh, a dedicated burial site for amputated limbs in the UK. Oh, really? Yeah. Well, you can go and you can basically have a funeral exactly as you described for the part of you that that seems nice. I might actually do something like that because I think if I had, say, my arm amputated, I'd really want to show it respect. It was my arm. It did a good job. You know, it didn't do anything bad against me. It let me control it forever. Like, yeah. I have a very good friend who is Islamic and she told me that there's this, this, this, this idea where when you die, all of your body parts testify against you. Right. And, oh, okay. But that sounds a bit, I, I, What you mean is like, if I've committed a sin with my hand, it will rat me out. Or it's more like, so my understanding of it, okay, is that when you're walking around in life and you say, oh, my damn knees, they're really annoying. They're just not strong enough. I hate them, whatever. And then after you die, your knees are there testifying against you and saying, look at all of those stairs I carried her up. Look at her baby who I helped her carry for nine months. And then all the times we should sort of carry to her child and I was there supporting her. And then she spent the rest of her life slagging me off, you know, like, this is really unfair. Right. But there's something actually quite beautiful about that, this idea that you have to have genuine gratitude for all of your body parts for the support that they give you while you're alive, because after you're dead, they'll, they'll testify against you if you were not a good steward of them. Yeah. Now I have to say, I'm not a scholar of Islam. So people, please let us know in the comments if I have misunderstood that. Right. But I think there's something quite beautiful about that. It really is beautiful. So what, I mean, what restrictions are there? You said in the UK, you can have your own amputated parts. So long as there's no public health risk. I mean, kind of, you can't cremate it. That is one thing you can't do. Wait, tell me more. You can't. So you can put it in a bonfire in your own garden. Yeah. As long as it's not on public health risk, as long as you do it safely. But you can't take it to, you know, a cremation site. You can't take it to a company that does cremation for you and ask them to do it. And that's because of the rules within the sort of cremation industry. You can't legally have it cremated at a crematorium while you're still alive. And that is because crematoriums, this feels like a good rule, legally require a death certificate in order to operate. So, you know, if you're, if you're still there handing over your limb, they're not allowed to do it. Yeah. I get why they would need a death certificate because otherwise it could be a really great hack to get rid of a body that you've murdered. Like, oh, hey, here's my aunt Flo. Could you please dispose of the evidence? I mean, cremate her respectfully. Right. Okay. Yeah. Certainly that law could probably be changed to also require a certificate of amputation or something. Or maybe, maybe the, the, yeah, the, the authority of the individual to whom it once belongs. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, apart from that, really, you can sort of go wild. You can sell it if you want to. Okay. That's where I wanted to go next because that woman's foot looks really cool. Yeah. The skeleton of her foot bones and ankle. Like, could she sell that to me? Yes. Absolutely. And you can buy, so I had a look at this yesterday, you can buy all kinds of body parts, but particularly the bones, you know, basically as easily as, as, as buying a book. Now, hold on a second, because I've looked into this. I've been wanting a human skeleton my whole life. A whole skeleton. A whole real human skeleton. Here's the problem. The ethics of it. Most human skeletons that are available for purchase are of dubious provenance. They're usually like, yeah, this is from a person who lived in India in 1897. Probably didn't totally consent to this. It probably wasn't their dream for you to display their skeleton, but it's here. And we can no longer just do what people did in the 19th century. So here's what I want to do. And you can tell me if this is going to be more possible. I would love a human skeleton, but I want it to be Jeff Bezos' skeleton. Specifically. Specifically his. Have you written to him and told him this is your plan? No, but let's say that this is my official declaration to Jeff Bezos. Give me your skeleton. And here's why him, or maybe someone like him, it needs to be someone who isn't super sympathetic so that if someone comes into my house and they see a human skeleton and I've got a silly hat on it and they're like, dude, that's disrespectful. I can say it was Jeff Bezos. Like he had a bunch of money in life. He's fine. Like I don't want the skeleton to belong to like an innocent person who even if they fully consented to like, I want you to exhibit my skeleton forever. I still would feel like I deserve it. Deserved a certain amount of respect that I might not always want to give it. So I want someone's skeleton that could be put into funny poses. What if it was someone who just had a really, really good sense of humor? Like what if you went for a famous comedian? Well, yes. Okay. Here's an even better example. Like I would be totally happy to give my wife or my daughter my skeleton after my death and they can do whatever they want with it. They can make me pick my butt. They can make me do whatever because that's my sense of humor. Right. In fact, here's another declaration. And my wife refuses to do this, but instead of a grave stone, I want a toilet that is like a bench, but it's a toilet that has like in memory of Michael Stevens and people can sit on it and look at the view, but she doesn't want a toilet to be my tombstone. Wait, sorry. I misunderstood. Why do you want a toilet to be your tombstone? Because it's just funny. It's just a bit. Yeah. It's just like, hey, why is there a toilet in this cemetery? Now, maybe that's disrespectful to the other people buried there. Because suddenly you turn the cemetery into a bathroom. I turn it into a bathroom. So maybe it's more like a public park, puts up a memorial toilet for me. I do like the idea of having a bit for after you die. You know, Spike Milligan is very amazing British writer, comedy writer. On his tombstone, he had insisted that I had inscribed, I told you I was ill. Oh, really? Yeah. That's really good. And I just I like not taking it all too seriously. My idea for having a memorial toilet for myself comes from this artist's installation in the UK for a memorial to Joseph Grimaldi, the clown, where the artist put these like coffin shaped musical tiles on the ground. So you could dance on the grave of Grimaldi to make music. And being as he's a clown and it all felt like it actually kind of all fit. But yet it feels a bit disrespectful to be dancing on a grave. Now, he isn't actually buried underneath them, but I liked a silly oddball memorial. There is somebody who has donated their skeleton to be displayed forever. That who Jeremy Bentham. Oh, of course. Yeah. Right. I've never seen it, but you've seen it. I've seen it. I've seen it. And is it a skeleton or is there still like dried flesh on it? Oh, there's dried. Well, OK, so there's there's a couple of different parts. So we should just say, Jeremy Bentham, he's the father of utilitarianism, this philosopher, but he also was one of the founders of the university, which I did my PhD in, was a professor for a number of years. This is like 1830s was when he died. And he wanted to donate his body to science. He was like, I think that actually a great act would be to have a public dissection of my body, you know, let people see, you know, and I want it to be on display. I want my body to be on display. So they did the dissection. Was this for like the public's knowledge or was it that he found it kind of titillating? Like it was an exhibitionist thing. I think it was for public knowledge. OK, I guess we can't prove what was really in his mind. Well, what happened to his head is. Yeah, I've heard it got like turned into a soccer ball or something. Yeah, it's pretty gruesome. So one of the that they decided the flesh on his body and his body was dissected and his skeleton has been packed into a suit, sort of like it looks like a wax work figure, like a madam to swords type thing. So he's kind of like sitting there in this pose. He's got all his clothes on. It's on display permanently. Can you see the bones or are they covered in wax? They're covered in wax. He sits in this class cabinet in the cloisters of of UCL permanently. So you can just go past and just see his dead body at all times. But his head, what they wanted to do, there was this technique that people were trying, which was to dehydrate the head, sort of like a mummification technique. And so his head, it's, I think it didn't really work very well. I think they didn't get the mixture right. So it's sort of this like grotesque, leathery raisin, right? It's really not very nice tool. So that's kept separate from the body. You kind of. So the. Oh, so it's stored to be seen with no head. No, it's got a wax head on it. Oh, and there's no skull inside the. No skull inside the. Because the head is kept, the real skull is kept separate. It's still, I think it's on display. I've certainly seen it. So I think it's on display sometimes, but not all of the time. The thing is that head, right? It's obviously this great object of reverence and importance to UCL. And so there have been times when the rivals of UCL, Kings College, London, have broken in, stolen it, used it for ransom. There was one story about them in the cloisters of using it as a football. You know, just like really not cool Victorian shenanigans going on here. But I should also say that his body, while it is on display, he also still attends the meetings that they have. Oh, like the kind of big, important meetings. Right. They bring his bones in. Yeah. And then they always record in the minutes that Jeremy Brentham was present, but did not vote. I love that. It's kind of. And that's what he would have wanted. That's what he would have wanted. So then that's great. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what you can do to. He was like, over my dead body, do stuff. And they are. And that's that's I mean, the thing is that this is like 1830s. He died 1832, I think. So it's becoming 200 years. Right. I think this is it. You know, you or your idea of giving your skeleton to your daughter and your wife so you can they can pose you have you on. You're going to your skeleton will outlast their lifetimes really significantly. Right. So who gets it after them? Who gets it after and who gets it after and after? I mean, this is like a big question. Tell you what, let's come back to that properly after the break, actually, about what you do with people after they've died. But just on that whole idea of amputation of body parts first, because while this idea of selling them or taxidermy them are kind of normal things to do. There is one story about a young man who had his foot amputated in a motorbike crash and he managed to successfully navigate all of the legal loopholes to take his severed limb home and instead of bearing it, he took a bit of his own anterior muscle, cooked it with onions and peppers and served in fajitas to 10 of his friends. His friends knew what was going on. OK, yes. OK, I was going to ask this before the break. I'm like, hold on a second. You can take it and you can cremate it and you can display it, but can you eat it? Tell me. Absolutely fine. That was fine. Absolutely fine. So feeding it to other people consensually with their knowledge is allowed to. That's that's like a loophole to be able to eat human flesh. Yeah. So what did it taste like? I don't know. Surely he ate some of it without the onions and whatnot, because I want to I would want to get the real flavor. I did an episode years ago about what does human taste like. And I hadn't heard of this motorbike incident. Did that happen after I made the episode? Because I had to go back pretty far to a guy who got some meat from a cadaver and said that human meat most closely resembled veal. But this motorbike story. OK, some some people have asked, how would you describe the taste on a scallop one to ten? And he said, give it a solid six point five. Better than hot dog or regular burger. Maybe equal with regular bacon, but nowhere near as good as butter, so scallops or red soupy, tenderloin, seared in grapeseed oil and cast iron pan. Well, that's a pretty good review. Better than hot dogs and burgers. I'm surprised because, you know, we're not talking about a choice cut. No, no, we're not. We're talking about what, a muscle from the ankle or the foot. Yeah, like that's not a famously tender cut of meat. When did this happen? This is seven years ago. Oh, OK, I made my episode 12 years ago, so I should do an update. You do. You need to. I should have been invited to that fajita party. I'm a bit upset. I think he still has some. Should we message him and ask? Yeah, I'll message him after the show because I would love to try some of this meat. He says, tastes like buffalo, but chewier, super beefy and little fat. Beefy. Yeah, there'd be little fat. What you really need has anyone ever had their, I was good if they ever had their like loins or chest amputated. I don't think there's a lot of chest amputations, but I'd love it like a human rib, but that's never going to happen. But awful. I mean, I had my uterus amputated effectively. Like I should have, if I'd known about this at the time, I could have had some awful uterus placenta. I mean, people eat placenta. People eat placenta. Apparently, it's not like a traditional thing that it really only became a thing in the seventies, eating your own placenta. I think it's not a real thing. Yeah. I think it's it's not a traditional. I think there are reasons why in the animal world, outside of humans, it makes a lot of sense when nutrition is hard to get by and you've got a breast feed, you need that nutrition. But in the human world, it's rarely necessary. But as I keep saying, I feel like I've said this like now three times on the podcast, the placenta is vegan. It is vegan because the animal has voluntarily abandoned it. If they haven't eaten it themselves, like dig in. Hey, so is this foot. These were vegan for heaters they were eating. That's right. Yeah. He voluntarily cooked it up and gave it to his friends. Yeah. So if any of you have an amputation coming up and want to buy a microphone for lunch. But yeah, please invite me. And as a bonus, I would really love to be the one to cook it. I smoke it. It's one of my hobbies. It's like one of the few things I can do that doesn't feel like work. Even if I'm watching a movie, I still I feel like this might inform some episode about society or whatever. But cooking, I do that for my family all the time. I cook all of our dinners and it's just like I love it. So I'd love to be able to cook human meat and say, here's the thing about human meat, you know, you got to you got to stew it or here's the thing. You got to smoke it. You got to use apple or cherry. Don't use hickory. I would love to just have knowledge like that. Hold on though. That doesn't that make your smoker thing part of work then immediately. If you're doing it for human meat and then talking about it. OK, if I talk about it on the podcast, that's different than if I use it in a Vsauce episode, I feel like here, this is where I share my life. This is where I share my tips and tricks on eating people. But I wouldn't do that outside of this. Would you consider doing that? Would you consider having a flesh removed for this purpose? That is a really good question because I don't think that I would if it wasn't necessary, I still feel too much of a like obligation to my body to like respect it and I can't think of why I would deliberately have muscle removed so I could eat it. I'd feel guilty. Like I'm sorry, you know, but cheek that I trimmed you down. I guess if I did like liposuction, if I had liposuction, could I keep the fat? I'd drink it. Well, I would like render it first and then I could like poach some, you know, scallops in it. Sure. Human fat. I wonder what that would taste like. Is it more like lard or tallow or shmaltz? I'm surprised that it's beefy. You know, I would have guessed it would be more picky. Yeah, what determines whether some something is beefy or piggy? I know that there's been reports from hundreds of years ago where people ate human meat and said that it was like veal or pork. And now veal is beefy, but unlike a cow, humans don't eat grass. Like our diet is more like a pig's diet. It's omnivorous. So I would think that that would cause us to taste more like pork since you are what you eat. I get it. I think it would also really depend on where you cut the meat from. I think you're right. I think that would make a big difference. You know, if you're if you're eating ankle muscle, I mean, I don't know, you get a good sense of what the overall thing tastes like. Yeah. Yeah. Ankle, shin, those are famously bad, tough pieces of meat. You need to slow cook that stuff, not put in a feeder. I, well, depends. If you put it in like a slow cooker and let it just stew there with a bunch of seasonings, it could get nice. Could get nice. Okay. I tell you what, I think let's go for a break. And then, I mean, up until now, this has mostly been about people who are alive, deciding what to do with their own body parts. After the break, I want to talk about what happens to your body parts after your death and who they belong to. Great. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. We often think of beating cancer as treatment, but imagine stopping it before it begins. After years of work, Cancer Research UK scientists are launching a clinical trial of lung vax, the first vaccine designed to prevent lung cancer. It builds on TracerX, the world's largest cancer evolution study, which tracked lung cancer cells over many years to uncover the diseases of earliest warning signs. Lung vax is designed to train the immune system to spot these signs early on, destroying faulty cells before cancer develops. So it's not treatment, but preventative, with the potential to stop lung cancer before it starts. The first stage of the trial starts this year, focusing on people at higher risk. It shows what long-term research makes possible. For more information about cancer research, you can find out at Cancer Research UK. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash the rest is science. Welcome back. So there's quite a tragic story that I want to tell you about that I think really indicates this idea of ownership of your own body, particularly after your child was a woman who was 21 years old. She was called Laura and she had a little girl, two and a half year old, but her mother would Rachel, she had this kidney failure. Right. So you've got three women, basically three generations, three generations, right? Grandmother, mother, daughter. The grandmother has kidney failure, really serious kidney failure that was actually triggered by diabetes that she'd had when she'd been pregnant with her daughter. Okay. So it's all kind of connected. Yeah. And Laura, the daughter, the 21 year old, was going to donate her kidney to her mother. Yeah. So at that point, when you say, I'm alive, I'm going to give you my kidney, you have complete ownership over your own organ. Makes sense. You decide what happens to it. But unfortunately, before any of the paperwork could be sorted, Laura just so happened to suffer this massive fatal asthma attack. Okay. Whoa. Okay. So she hasn't, she, she died before she signed the paperwork, officially giving her kidneys to her mother. Correct. But even if she had had the paperwork before she'd been alive, as soon as she was dead, she can donate her kidneys and her family can sit on her bathroom to donate her kidneys, but she has no say in who that kidney goes to. Oh yeah. So the human tissue authority, the people who regulate all this stuff, they had to step into, to basically enforce these really strict laws that we have about bodily ownership. And the legal stance of this is, you know, she was donating her organs fine, but she couldn't say that they would go to her mother because a corpse cannot be property. Yeah. Like humans are not objects. And so if they are not objects, if they are not property, they don't belong to anybody. In life, she could make the decision to give my kidney while I'm alive to this specific person. Yeah. But once she's dead, now you say a corpse isn't property, but I can own an amputated hand, for example. You can buy and sell it. You can. Yes. You can buy and sell it, which is like a bit of a weird gray area. But in terms of organs, the organ removal then went to the, the person who needed it the most, which in that case wasn't the mother. You had, and this is really tragic story, right? You had the transplant coordinator who was literally crying in the hospital. And nonetheless, that the kidneys had to be given to these anonymous strangers who are on this national waiting list. And the real tragedy of this is that the grandmother, Rachel, who was denied this organ transplant, actually then very sadly passed away before she could get another kidney. Really awful story, leaving the two and a half year old daughter without a mother or a grandmother. Yeah. The laws have changed as a result of, I was going to say, I feel like it would be fair to say, if you're going to donate your organs after death, a relative who needs them, who has a use for them, could take precedent over who's at the top of the waiting list. Yeah. So that does now happen as long as there isn't a super urgent case on the waiting list within 72 hours, I think of the donation. Got it. Okay. So now a family member does take precedent. Well, because we've got two kidneys and could they could have given one to someone at the top of the list and the other to the grandma. Yeah. But there's, I think that there's this really interesting philosophical question that comes into all of this, because this isn't the first time that, that bodies not being property and therefore not belonging, you know, it's not something that, that you can say this is my, because if it was a will, right? If it was her house or her car or whatever, of course she gets to dictate in very strict terms where it should go to, because it belonged to her body rather than it was a different type of ownership. You know, everything kind of goes out the window. This is actually because of these ancient church laws that, that we have, you know, the idea that it's, it's called Res Nullis, meaning it belongs to nobody, right? This body. But this was also the reason or a great cause of all of the, the grave, grave robbing that happened in the 1800s when dissection became really popular. The notion that the body doesn't belong to anyone meant that finder's keepers. Yep. Finders keepers. So it meant that you couldn't be legally charged for stealing a corpse, but you could be charged with a really serious felony if you stole the clothes that, that the person was buried in. So then this additional indignity, this is like 1800s, right? Professional body snatchers would take the bodies out of the grave and then meticulously strip and make it before sealing them and then make their, their getaway. Um, which is just absolutely insane that, that it's, it's stealing a human fine, but, um, a cheap linen shirt and you get sent to Australia. Right, right, right. Yeah. Stealing a naked body, that's fine. Yeah. Stealing one in clothes, you're a clothing thief. So, so what they, that's been changed. That has, well, I don't know whether that has probably been changed. Like if I went and I dug up a grave right now, I feel like I'd get in trouble for trespassing and destroying property and defiling a dead body, which is like scandalous to the public, even if I wasn't charged with theft. I think there's also, what would you do with it? Where would you go with it? How would you profit off it? Because at the, one of the big reasons why grave robbing was such a big thing was that there was incredible demand from, from scientists and, and medics and doctors who, who wanted to understand how the body works, right? Dissection was this really big thing going on. And that all changed in, in 1832 when they brought in a new law that says the medical dissection of unclaimed bodies was completely fine. So if you were, I mean, it's basically, it's, it's code for extremely poor. If you're extremely poor, then you were fair game. And so while a body cannot be owned, it can be claimed. Yeah, right. Exactly. I think that's a, that distinction makes sense. I think owning, owning someone's body after they're dead sounds a bit odd, but I can bequeath my bones to my daughter and she can own them, but she can't own the whole body or she can't own organs. Right. So I've just looked up because it does feel like a big contradiction, isn't it? That, that you can, a dead body isn't property, but you can own a skeleton. Right. And the short answer is that it becomes property when somebody applies work and skill to it. Okay. Right. So if they amputate my foot, that's like some work that's been done. Yeah. But just someone dying, it's not up for grabs. Right. Right. If I saw someone have a heart attack at the store, I couldn't be like, mine, but if they died, a hospital could harvest their organs and give them to me. If I'm like on the list. Not quite. So if you just, if you just amputated, that doesn't count, that doesn't meet the threshold for work and skill. You've got to do something else to it. You've got to feed it to Beatles. Okay. Okay. But the hospital, can they send my amputated limb home with me or does it have to be like packaged up or cleaned before I can take it home? I think it definitely has to be in a, in a special bag. It's probably going to be in a special bag. I don't think you're allowed to carry it on your hand. My wife had a tooth removed and I asked if we could have it and the doctor said, problem is they hadn't just like pulled it out. They'd had to crunch it up. So it was all in like pieces and she, so I think she had like already thrown it out, but could have given us the pieces. I've got a lot of cat teeth. We had a cat who needed teeth removed and I'm like, can I have them? And they were like, sure. Yeah. And they're pretty awesome. I feel like a witch with my little like cat tooth jar and I'm like, oh yes, I need a little cat tooth for this love potion. Powdered cat tooth. Yeah. And a heart shaped blood stain. I think there is a lot of gray area around the body stuff. Yeah. That idea though of owning somebody's body after they have died. I mean, you brought up the ethics of skeletons earlier. I mean, there are some really dark stories, some really nasty stories. I think possibly the most grotesque I heard about and I looked into it. This college in Oxford where at the end of dinner, they would drink from a skull. Right? Yeah. It's absolutely true. Who's skull? Well, this is the really dark thing about it. So no one is quite sure, but this was a decades long tradition. They don't do it anymore. They turned it into a dessert bowl after it started leaking, which is just even more grotesque. But the cup was donated to the college in 1946 by a eugenicist. Right? Which tells you the direction this is going to go in. It was originally bought at an auction in Sotheby's in 1884, when people have done radiocarbon dating on it. The skull is 225 years old and the physical dimensions of it strongly suggest that it belonged to an enslaved woman in the Caribbean. Yeah. Yeah. That's usually the provenance of these kinds of things. It was someone who didn't have the rights that they deserved to say, don't take my skeleton and sell it to some rich dude in England. Yeah. It's usually not just like Jeff Bezos because he's got power and he can decide what happens to his skeleton, but a person who is homeless, a person who is oppressed, that's usually the kind of thing that winds up being out there on the market. That's why Jeff, you owe it to the world to give me your skeleton. So I had a look online yesterday at Skulls Unlimited, which is a place that you can buy and sell them. You can buy a skull for a couple of grand. You could buy a fetal skull as well. It's really grotesque, a lot of this stuff, really dark. If I was a medical school, I would think that acquiring pieces like that could be helpful for continuing education. The greater good. But to put in my own home, no. Yeah, agree. Unless it was like, yeah, this person either wanted someone to own and display their remains, or this person deserves a little disrespect. Just here and there around. Yeah, just a little bit, just like for funsies. Yeah. Lord Byron did this once. He had this massive estate and his garden was digging up in the grounds and just came across loads of skulls from monks who had lived there a century earlier. Would you like to guess what Byron did with them? He was 19 years old at the time, by the way. Byron's got quite reputation. How many? Like a lot? A few, more than one, not sure how many. Do you do something decorative with them? He made them into drinking goblets. Oh, he did. Yeah, he did. Goblets. He had them polished and mounted on the silver stand. And where are they now? Do we know? You know what? His estate was purchased by a big game hunter and his wife, and the wife was a devout Christian and thought it was absolutely disgusting. She thought it was this horrible, morbid thing that Byron had done. And so she dismantled the goblet. She had the silver removed. She gave the monk's skull a proper Christian blessing and then secretly reburied it somewhere on the vast grounds of the estate. Okay, well, that's kind of a nice thing to do. It's decent. Right. They did not ask for their skulls to be turned into goblets. He wrote a poem about it as well. Oh, he did? Yeah. It was called Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup Formed from a Skull. I mean, for someone who was known for his words, that's not a particularly good title, I don't think. It wouldn't work on YouTube. It's a descriptive title. It's descriptive. I think it could work on YouTube. It depends on what, like, his brand is. Goblet prank, gone skull. Anyway, he said that it was better for a skull to hold the drink of gods than to be food for worms. Essentially, that's what the poem's about. I mean, it depends on what the monks wanted. I think it depends on what the monks wanted. And I think that probably the monks, you know, didn't want to be slobbered over for the rest of time. Yeah. I think you've got to be careful about this wish to give your skeleton to your family, you know. I trust them to. Just don't trust the many generations of people to come afterwards. I mean, yeah, I don't either, but that's fine with me. Like, I know what could happen and I'm fine with it. You're okay with it. I do want my flesh to go back to the earth, though. I think that I, at least the stuff that the earth wants back, that earthworms and microbes will eat, they should take back. But the bones, I think, are less interesting to living things. And so it's fine, I think, for them, in my opinion, to stick around as toys or decorations. Things wearing silly hats for the rest of time. I've always thought about the privacy rights of it all. Like, we've got King Tut's body. And we've just taken photographs and you can see it. After a certain point in time, do people lose that ownership of their own bodies and wishes? Well, I think it's basically the moment after their death, they lose it, really. This idea of body snatching or stealing body parts has happened to famous people throughout history. Einstein is a really good example of this. His brain was stolen out of his head. Yeah, what was the story? Because I read Driving Mr. Albert when I was a kid and I loved it. It's a book about Einstein's brain and how it, I don't know, someone had it in their trunk for a while. Right. But I don't remember, so tell me. Okay, so he was really deliberate in his instructions. He did not want to become this relic that was passed around. He absolutely did not want that for himself. So he demanded that his entire body be cremated immediately. Right, that's what Einstein wanted. And his ashes scattered in a secret location as well. But the pathologist who was on call the night that he died, a guy called Dr. Thomas Stoltz-Harvey decided, no, I'm going to take this opportunity. I think Einstein's wishes are less important than science. So during the autopsy, he literally stole Einstein's brain. Yeah. He hid it away, didn't have private permission from anybody. And then when the theft was noticed a few days later, how was it noticed? I'll try to maybe pick them up and we're like, this feels a bit like. His head feels like. The hospital was absolutely furious, but what Harvey did was he sort of circumvented all of the bureaucrats and went directly to Einstein's son, Hans Albert, and then managed to secure this sort of retrospective blessing in order to keep the brain on the condition that it could only be used for really rigorous scientific interrogation. Okay, so that would have been great, but Harvey was not this neuroscientist. He's not a person who knows how to do any of this stuff. And so he ended up, he refused to give the brain back to anybody. He was kind of holding onto it. And then he ended up going on this completely insane 40 year road trip where this brain was cut up into little chunks. He cut up in 240 little blocks. And then preserved them in this really rubbery cellulose. And dividing it into different jars here and then and then put them in this wooden cider box and then put it in the trunk of his car. And then was like moving around the American Midwest, going and seeing people and being like, what do you think of this? The first paper that was actually published on this wasn't till a few decades after, 30 years after Einstein's actual death. And in terms of the scientific insights that we've got from this, it's almost nothing because the brain was, you know, cut up in a way that wasn't usable, that wasn't given to the right people, all of this stuff. So really all we know about Einstein's brain is that it doesn't look that different to normal brains. Yeah. Golly. So what, he was just like driving it around to show it off to people? Was he trying to sell it or what? No, I think he knew he had this incredible scientific pleasure. And he would kind of bring it out. He would like bring it out the cupboard and show friends. And, you know, he would mail chunks to researchers who asked for it. Right. It's all over the place now, by the way. It's not, it's not kind of united in one place. Do you have some of it? Would I like some of it? I mean, secretly, yes, I would. I have to confess. I think it's incredibly disrespectful, but I probably still would quite like some of it. Especially given that he did not want to be a relic, which is exactly what it is now. Like all these little mystical relics are now all spread out around. I don't want to be a relic either. I want to be, at least I want to be totally given back to the earth. At most, keep parts of me around for derision and jokes. But I do not want to be venerated. Yeah. Yeah, no, definitely not. Definitely not. I belong to my family and the earth and that's it. Have you ever given anyone a lock of your hair? No. Although I did mention on this podcast once before that there was a point in my childhood when my sister grabbed a massive handful of my hair and my mom kept it. And she kept it. She kept it. Yeah. So there is a lock of my hair that exists, but no, I've never given it. I think that's bluntly a little creepy. Do you? Okay. No. I don't have a lot of hair to give. I've also never... Is that with fingernails for me? You know? What? I think fingernails and like giving someone a lock of hair, you may as well just give them a fingernail, you know? There's a difference though. Like the hair is like, now I sound like I'm some kind of hair collecting freak. I've never wanted a lock of anyone's hair nor have I been given any. Though I do have a tiny amount of my daughter's hair from her first haircut. Her grandmother did it and I'm like, oh, I should save this. Assuming that there'll be someday be like a museum for my daughter and her history. But I get how, I mean, hair is more decorative and beautiful, right? I'm trying to think of other times where there's hair besides wigs. It feels more clean. It's like, it's like always dead stuff, right? Whereas like a piece of skin would be more weird. A scab. A scab. My daughter's first scab. I don't have my daughter's first scab. You could do though and she couldn't have any rights to it, you know? That's what we've learned from this episode. Yeah. You essentially do not own any of yourself once it's not attached to your body. Once your, yourself is no longer attached to your body, you don't own any at all. So back to our first question, who owns my baby teeth? They are in my mother's home. Could I force her to give them to me legally? I don't think you could. Are you serious? Even though they're from me? I don't think you could. I think once they have left you. I mean, she owns them, right? And like I gave her permission when I was a kid to keep them and I have not asked for them back the whole time I've been an adult. If she refused to give them back to me, which she hasn't by the way, I don't want people to think that my mom stole my teeth, but I'm just imagining that she really wanted to keep them and would not let me have them. Could I say, yeah, but I grew them. No. My DNA was the blueprint for them. I don't think you can. I don't think you can. I think there is not anything special about biological material that came from your body that means you have an automatic right over it, which is a really strange idea to me. That remains a really strange idea. Yeah, but you've mixed up your daughter's teeth. I know. Could you do a DNA test on them? Probably. Would it be worth it? Hang on, this one belongs to a cat. Oh no, what happened? This has all been really fascinating, but in future episodes, we're going to be talking about not just who owns and has rights over body parts, but who owns instructions to make body parts. What's the deal with my DNA or yours or a gene that I invent myself? Or what about an embryo? What about something that has its own DNA and can become a person? It's very different than a foot, I would say. Or what about my own thoughts? There's a lot of cool stuff to talk about. Please join us next time. Until then, hold on to your hats and your heads because we've got a lot of cool stuff coming. We certainly do. As ever, if you would like to ask us a question, we might just answer it on our Thursday episodes. You can send that to therestofscienceatgullhanger.com. All right, see you next time. Bye-bye. you