(no subject)

barrysarll and innerbrat have seen that dead body circuses will need a license however the Human Tissues Act requires that anywhere which performs post-mortems, removes body parts and stores body parts for "scheduled purposes" will require a licence. So that includes mortuaries, universities, an awful lot of museums, and most hospitals.

The act also does not apply to human bodies or material more than one hundred years old. The British Museum won't need a licence for the Egyptian Mummies, but would probably need a licence for some of its other ethnographic material.

Fertility clinics (who get an Act all of their own), people working on cell culture lines- or any other material created outside the body, and hairdressers and manicurists are exempt. You really shouldn't need a licence to throw away toenail clippings! More importantly Archaeology and the tissue sampling that doesn't require identification of individuals are exempt.

The act was a fairly sensible reaction to the Bristol hospital scandal where the pathologist was removing organs without permission of the parents (and sometimes against their express wishes). The quango that regulates it is currently deciding what they have to do about von Hagens. If a teaching collection has to be licenced then so does Earl's Court.