mean that many established institutions already have all the bones they need. The biggest buyers of skeletons are new and growing schools throughout the world that need to outfit their labs. Many medical schools around the developing world, most notably Pakistan and China, still source their bones from local graveyards—occasionally risking public ire. But large-scale exports have dwindled.
In the United States some institutions have turned to plastic replicas. But artificial substitutes aren’t ideal. “Plastic models are reproductions of a single specimen and don’t include the range of variations found in real osteology,” says Samuel Kennedy, who stocks the anatomy program at Harvard Medical School. Students trained on facsimiles never see these differences. Moreover, the models aren’t entirely accurate. “The molding process doesn’t capture the detail of a real specimen,” Kennedy adds. “This is especially critical in the skull.”
In the United States, major dealers like Kilgore International who made a fortune when importing skeletons was legal are now making do selling replicas. “My father would have done almost anything to get back into the bone business,” says Craig Kilgore, who runs the company his father founded. “He was legally blind but would still come to the office and write letters to anyone, anywhere in the world, that he felt could be of help to reopen the supply.”
Some of those letters found unlikely homes. Shortly after the ban, while investigating potential new sources of bones in famine-plagued regions of Africa, a bone dealer in Nigeria told him about warehouses full of bones that were ready for export. For $50,000 he would have a near-unlimited source of human materials. The only problem was that the money would have to be delivered in cash. In Lagos.
Too old to go on his own, Charles Kilgore recruited his son, Craig, to get on a plane and meet the dealers at the Hilton Hotel. His contact convinced him to get in a car with him and drive to the outskirts of the city to an abandoned warehouse district that bordered the jungle. “A person could go into that jungle and probably never come out,” he recalled.
Worried that it was a setup, he started using the names of bones that he was interested in by the wrong terms; the distributors he was with didn’t bother to correct him. Sensing danger, Kilgore convinced the purported dealers that the money was in another location and that they would have to drop him off so that he could retrieve it. When his associates were out of sight, he took a cab to the airport and caught the next plane out of town. Even though Kilgore and several other domestic skeleton importers scoured the world for new sources of bones, they were never able to find any, and the industry fell into a steep decline.
Craig’s father, who died in 1995, didn’t live to see the reemergence of the trade.
TUCKED AWAY ON A side street between one of Kolkata’s largest graveyards and one of its busiest hospitals, Young Brothers’ headquarters looks more like an abandoned warehouse than a leading distributor of human skeletons. The rusted front gate appears to have been padlocked and forgotten a decade ago. Above the entrance, the company sign is a tableau of peeling paint.
It wasn’t always this way. The building was bustling with activity in 2001, according to former Kolkata Health Department chief and head of West Bengal’s opposition party Javed Ahmed Khan. At the time, neighbors complained that the Young Brothers offices stank of death. Huge piles of bones lay drying on the roof. Part Eliot Ness and part Ralph Nader, Khan is the sort of politician who has no patience for police inaction and is happy to take the law into his own hands. His tactics can be brutal and have landed him in jail on several occasions—like the time in 2007 when he assaulted a doctor in a medical school who was accused of raping one of his constituents.
In 2001, when the police refused
In the United States some institutions have turned to plastic replicas. But artificial substitutes aren’t ideal. “Plastic models are reproductions of a single specimen and don’t include the range of variations found in real osteology,” says Samuel Kennedy, who stocks the anatomy program at Harvard Medical School. Students trained on facsimiles never see these differences. Moreover, the models aren’t entirely accurate. “The molding process doesn’t capture the detail of a real specimen,” Kennedy adds. “This is especially critical in the skull.”
In the United States, major dealers like Kilgore International who made a fortune when importing skeletons was legal are now making do selling replicas. “My father would have done almost anything to get back into the bone business,” says Craig Kilgore, who runs the company his father founded. “He was legally blind but would still come to the office and write letters to anyone, anywhere in the world, that he felt could be of help to reopen the supply.”
Some of those letters found unlikely homes. Shortly after the ban, while investigating potential new sources of bones in famine-plagued regions of Africa, a bone dealer in Nigeria told him about warehouses full of bones that were ready for export. For $50,000 he would have a near-unlimited source of human materials. The only problem was that the money would have to be delivered in cash. In Lagos.
Too old to go on his own, Charles Kilgore recruited his son, Craig, to get on a plane and meet the dealers at the Hilton Hotel. His contact convinced him to get in a car with him and drive to the outskirts of the city to an abandoned warehouse district that bordered the jungle. “A person could go into that jungle and probably never come out,” he recalled.
Worried that it was a setup, he started using the names of bones that he was interested in by the wrong terms; the distributors he was with didn’t bother to correct him. Sensing danger, Kilgore convinced the purported dealers that the money was in another location and that they would have to drop him off so that he could retrieve it. When his associates were out of sight, he took a cab to the airport and caught the next plane out of town. Even though Kilgore and several other domestic skeleton importers scoured the world for new sources of bones, they were never able to find any, and the industry fell into a steep decline.
Craig’s father, who died in 1995, didn’t live to see the reemergence of the trade.
TUCKED AWAY ON A side street between one of Kolkata’s largest graveyards and one of its busiest hospitals, Young Brothers’ headquarters looks more like an abandoned warehouse than a leading distributor of human skeletons. The rusted front gate appears to have been padlocked and forgotten a decade ago. Above the entrance, the company sign is a tableau of peeling paint.
It wasn’t always this way. The building was bustling with activity in 2001, according to former Kolkata Health Department chief and head of West Bengal’s opposition party Javed Ahmed Khan. At the time, neighbors complained that the Young Brothers offices stank of death. Huge piles of bones lay drying on the roof. Part Eliot Ness and part Ralph Nader, Khan is the sort of politician who has no patience for police inaction and is happy to take the law into his own hands. His tactics can be brutal and have landed him in jail on several occasions—like the time in 2007 when he assaulted a doctor in a medical school who was accused of raping one of his constituents.
In 2001, when the police refused
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