Reason Online, Feb. 7, 2007 Alistair Cooke's body lay cold in the embalming room of an East Harlem funeral home, suspended in the brief limbo between death and cremation. A "cutter" soon arrived to make a collection. He sliced open Cooke's legs, sawed the bones from the hip, and took them away. The quintessentially British presenter of Masterpiece Theatre and Alistair Cooke's America-the face of genteel, urbane Albion to millions of Americans-was being carved up for parts. Cooke died on March 30, 2004, the victim of a cancer that spread from lung to bone. Susan Kittredge, Cooke's daughter, was mindful only of the potentially exorbitant funerary expenses and settled on a funeral home with a $595 cremation fee. The home promised Kittredge a box of ashes but said nothing of its bigger plans for her father, who would not make it to the cremator whole. For a fee, the funeral director gave a New Jersey tissue procurement agency access to Cooke's remains. His bones, worth some $7,000, were prepped for resale. Alistair Cooke's remains were only the most famous of more than a thousand bodies plundered by Michael Mastromarino, owner of Biomedical Tissue Services (BTS). He had a simple business model: Pay funeral directors for access to bodies and resell bones, heart valves, spines, and other tissues to biotech firms in need of spare parts. During the last five years, scandals involving tissue procured and resold illegally have chipped away at the neat separation between altruistic donation and big business. UCLA, Tulane, the University of Texas Medical Branch, and the University of California at Irvine have all been accused of reselling bodies donated for research.