In America, lots of jobs require some kind of credential.

Want to be a lawyer? You'll need a license. Dentist? License.

Electrician, accountant, taxi driver? License.

But if you want to chop up human bodies and sell them to researchers and pharmaceutical companies,

I could take a person apart within 15 minutes, you know, bag it and put in the freezer and it's ready to go.

I didn't have to have a funeral director's license.

I didn't have to have any type of medical degree or licensing to take possession of a human body. Many times I would be told,

are you a doctor? I go, no. I don't want to say there's zero regulation, but yeah,

but there is really no regulation.

For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is the economics of everyday things.

I'm Zachary Crackett.

Today, Cadavers Part 2.

In the first part of this series, we talked about the troubling history of cadavers in the United States,

how medical school anatomy labs used to obtain bodies from murders and grave robbers.

Those practices ended when the laws were changed to allow people like you and me to donate our bodies to science.

These days, around 20,000 Americans do that every year.

Some of those bodies are donated directly to medical schools.

Others go to for-profit companies that sell human body parts with very few legal restrictions.

Not much is known about how these so-called body brokers do business.

So today, we're going to hear from a man who spent more than a decade in the trade.

My name is Philip Guyette. I got into the body parts business back of like 1993.

And yeah, and it's just kind of, I don't know if you could say spot- body parts business back at like 1993.

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