Museums across the U.S., including at Harvard University, collected human remains, which were often displayed to the public.
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Proposed legislation would identify and protect African American cemeteries. But it wouldn’t cover the remains of thousands of Black people in museum collections.
Who gets to decide for the dead, such as this Egyptian mummy?
AP Photo/Ric Feld
Are DNA samples today’s version of the human skeletons that hung in 20th-century natural history museums? They can provide genetic revelations about our species’ history – but at an ethical price.
The ‘immortal’ HeLa cells.
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Henrietta Lacks’s ‘immortal’ cells changed medical research – although she never knew that.
This clay facial reconstruction of Kennewick Man, carefully sculpted around the morphological features of his skull, suggests how he may have looked alive nearly 9,000 years ago.
Brittney Tatchell, Smithsonian Institution
A 9,000-year-old skeleton became a high-profile and highly contested case for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. How do we respectfully deal with ancient human remains?
A morbid curiosity makes it hard not to be fascinated.
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You don’t have to be a physician or anatomist to be curious about how bodies work. Exhibits of dead human specimens have been around for quite a while – capitalizing on our fascination with death.