Harvard’s Cadaver Scandal Broke a Covenant Medicine Depends On

There is an old and intimate covenant at the heart of medical education.

A person decides that, after death, their body will still have something left to give. A family agrees to surrender the remains of someone they love so future physicians can learn and medicine can advance. The medical school serves as the trusted intermediary: it receives the gift, protects it, and ensures that it is used with dignity.

The student occupies the other end of that covenant.

For generations, medical students have learned anatomy from people whose names they never know. That anonymity is part of the dignity of the arrangement. Families need not imagine which student held a loved one’s heart; students need not turn a donor into a biography. What connects them is trust. The donor trusts the school. The family trusts the school. The student trusts the school.

Harvard Medical School’s cadaver scandal represents a rupture of that trust far greater than the misconduct of one employee.

Cedric Lodge, the former manager of Harvard Medical School’s morgue, participated in the theft and sale of human remains that had been donated and used for teaching and research. Federal prosecutors said he removed organs, skin, hands, faces, and other body parts. The misconduct began in 2018 and continued through at least March 2020; in December 2025, Lodge was sentenced to 8 years in federal prison.

Two weeks ago, Harvard agreed to pay $53 million to settle lawsuits brought by donor families. Those families are unquestionably the principal victims. To learn that the body of a parent, spouse, or sibling — entrusted to a great medical school as a final act of generosity — was ultimately treated as merchandise is almost impossible to comprehend.

But this cannot be dismissed as a “one bad apple” story.

Harvard commissioned an independent review of its Anatomical Gift Program after the scandal became public. The effort was worthwhile, but its central limitation was built into its mandate: the panel was not asked to investigate the underlying misconduct. It was asked primarily to recommend improvements going forward to adhere “to the highest standards and best practices.” In other words, Harvard’s goal was to study how to prevent the next failure, rather than fully accounting for the consequences of the last one.

And one group was largely missing from the retrospective inquiry: students.

I started at Harvard Medical School in summer 2020, at the height of COVID-19, and graduated in 2025. My classmates and I accepted extraordinary disruptions. Much of our education moved online. Anatomy — a discipline grounded in the physical reality of the human body — became substantially virtual. I never had the traditional experience of working with a cadaver that generations of medical students before me considered foundational. At the time, the explanation seemed obvious: COVID.

While I am not suggesting that the theft of human remains caused Harvard to move anatomy instruction online, and I fully acknowledge that the pandemic fundamentally transformed medical education, the resurgence of this scandal in the news has raised a new question in my mind. I find myself asking a question I never imagined I would have reason to ask: Was COVID the whole explanation?

Preparing donated bodies for medical education requires time, preservation, inventory, and careful stewardship. We now know that human remains were being stolen from the very program responsible for safeguarding bodies donated for teaching and research (albeit after they had been used for those purposes but prior to disposal).

Did that misconduct affect Harvard’s usual processes for donor availability? Did failures in inventory or chain of custody affect the anatomy curriculum? Did investigations influence how quickly students returned to hands-on learning?

I do not know, and that is precisely the problem.

Harvard’s review was not designed to answer those questions. A truly independent retrospective investigation should determine how the safeguards failed, where oversight broke down, what leadership knew or should have known, and whether those failures affected education or research. And those findings should be made public.

For my class, these questions are deeply personal. But the larger lesson extends beyond Harvard.

Congress is already considering bipartisan legislation to strengthen oversight of bodies donated for education and research. Harvard’s scandal shows why Congress should go further and direct HHS to establish national minimum standards for every institution entrusted with donated human remains, including medical schools. Those standards should require electronic chain-of-custody tracking, independent audits, documented access, prompt reporting of missing or mishandled remains, and meaningful participation by donor families and medical trainees in oversight. A donor’s dignity should not depend on the ZIP code of the medical school that receives the body.

The families affected by Harvard’s scandal deserve more than a settlement. They deserve confidence that the system has changed. Students deserve confidence too. We deserve to know what went wrong and exactly how that impacted our learning opportunities.

The donor trusts the school with their body. The family trusts the school with someone they loved. The student trusts the school to honor that sacrifice and use it to educate the next generation of physicians. Those are different obligations. But they are part of the same covenant.

The least medicine can give donors and medical students is a system worthy of that trust.

Editor’s note: The editor-in-chief of MedPage Today is an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, and was therefore recused from involvement in the production of this editorial.