Organ Tourism and Cadavers on Display Bill [HL]

Lord Moynihan Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 16th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, on the Bill, which is rightly commanding significant support in the House. The reason I take an interest in this issue, like the noble Lord, Lord Ribeiro, is the long-term support I have for the outstanding work undertaken by the Royal College of Surgeons. My grandfather, the first Lord Moynihan to sit on these Benches, was president of the Royal College of Surgeons, and I declare that I had the privilege to chair the fundraising committee for the Hunterian Museum, which houses the collection underpinned—as the noble Lord, Lord Ribeiro, said—by the repatriation policy that he admirably pursued.

The legislation before us achieves the right balance between authorisation of such collections and their use, closing some of the key loopholes. Yet the illegal or at least unethical use of cadavers without permission is still, as has been pointed out, a global problem. That said, major medical advances from which we all potentially benefit simply would not have been made, and could not be achieved, without the donation of cadavers.

The haptic feedback in medical training is essential, and however advanced holograms become for replacing cadavers it is important for the surgeon to understand and master the complex array of sensations that travel from the blade to the brain in advanced surgery. Yes, it is likely in coming decades that modern computer simulations will include haptic feedback, but it is only at that point that I can see immersive technologies replacing training on cadavers. A great deal of work is being undertaken in this pioneering field by the Royal College of Surgeons but, as one of the leading experts in the field, Shafi Ahmed, has said, we must not lose sight of the fact that:

“Two-thirds of the population, five billion people out of seven billion, do not have access to safe and affordable surgery.”


So, as set out in the Bill, strict standards must be in place, especially to cover the loopholes.

In 2004, as the House knows, we moved from second-person consent to the first-person consent which is necessary today. Yet Britain imports from America, for example, where rules are looser and second-person consent is permitted, in the use of unclaimed corpses from prisons and elsewhere, in many states. Supply is constrained and the demand for cadavers has increased in the UK, as the numbers training to be doctors increases. In 2005, medical schools in the UK asked for 600 cadavers; in 2017, it was 1,300. What is essential, as the noble Lord’s Bill confirms, is clear provenance in the UK—and ultimately worldwide—covering the procurement, handling and disposition of cadavers. This needs to be built into global regulatory frameworks.

It should no longer be the case that bodies which are willed to be used to educate medical students, to provide materials for patients or to promote research on human disease should subsequently be sold on to non-profit or, worse still, for-profit organisations without the knowledge and detailed informed consent of the donors. They were once living human beings and we should have legislative-backed respect extending at every stage from procurement to use, until final disposition takes place.