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(WCCO) The week before Thanksgiving, there was a packed memorial service at the University of Minnesota to thank and honor the nearly 100 donors who gave their bodies to the U's medical school for education and research during the past year. 

The attendees included students, faculty and hundreds of family members, including Dr. Marjorie Moore. Moore is an anatomy professor and her husband Bob's body was donated after he died of a heart attack at just 58.

"My husband was a pretty simple man and he didn't want any kind of big, elaborate ceremony when he died so this was a very simple solution. It was a way to make some kind of meaning out of a death that was way too early," said Moore.

The U's medical school faculty said donors are critical for teaching future doctors and for finding cures for diseases. One speaker told the families at the service that the donated cadavers are the students' first patients.

The University of Minnesota has a strict protocol to gain consent from donors and restrictions on how human bodies can be used and later disposed of. 

"We have uppermost level of institutional oversight possible," said Angela McArthur, the assistant director of the anatomy bequest program.

Grateful for the donations, McArthur is also concerned about a darker side of cadaver use.  It involves something called body brokers.  Brokers make money off selling bodies they buy or steal from nursing homes, funeral parlors and morgues.

Companies then buy those parts and use them to demonstrate medical devices to health care professionals. McArthur investigated a conference held a hotel last year near the airport.

"A report that we were able to obtain shows approximately 15 arm extremities were shipped frozen to a local hotel," McArthur said. "Somewhere in the hotel facility they were thawed and they were used in a skills lab."

A city health department investigation showed the sponsors did keep the ballroom locked and covered the tables where the demonstrations took place.

McArthur said she has heard reports elsewhere where body parts ended up on tables that could be used for a wedding reception later that day. There have also been scandals in other states which led to criminal charges against people involved in underground, unregulated cadaver sales.

"They are not on the radar," McArthur said. "They have nobody that they need to report to so we are concerned."

McArthur is chair of the Minnesota Commission on the Procurement and Use of Anatomical Donations. She wants new state and federal laws to regulate and register all cadaver donations, similar to what is already being done on a voluntary basis at the University of Minnesota medical school.

"We want to protect donors, donor families and the public who are in these spaces," McArthur said.

Those people would include Moore, who is now fighting terminal cancer. Like her husband, she plans to leave her body to the U's anatomy bequest program.

"It is not difficult for you to think about donating yourself?" WCCO-TV reporter Caroline Lowe asked Moore.

"No," Moore replied. "I love to think I am going to be a teacher forever."

McArthur hopes state lawmakers will approve legislation next year on regulating and restricting the use of human bodies.

If you would like to read more about the underground body parts market, journalist Annie Cheney has written a fascinating book. It is called "Body Brokers: Inside America's Underground Trade in Human Remains."

You must be at least 18 years old to donate your body to the U's anatomy bequest program.  There is no financial compensation for your donation.

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