3D Printing and the Murky Ethics of Replicating Human Bones
a fine of up to $100,000 and a one-year jail sentence. But many U.S. states allow commerce in other human remains, thanks in part to a major shortfall in American legislation: There is no law articulating whether human remains are people or objects.
For a digital image, “even if you ask conditions to be met, it is out there,” says Francisca Alves Cardoso, a biological anthropologist at the Center for Research Network in Anthropology in Lisbon, Portugal, who is investigating the ethics surrounding printed human bones. “You are not able to control it.”
The issue is particularly prominent in South Africa, where science — and anthropology in particular — has a history of unethically representing people and their remains. And today, South African curators are unsure of what to do with several types of relevant artifacts, including, which are plaster casts made of people’s faces that were once used to show physical differences between races.
But repatriation takes time, and even if some researchers are trying to remedy past mistakes, it isn’t clear what will happen if the remains are scanned in the meantime. “What if someone wants to 3D scan Bushman remains from the McGregor Museum?” L’Abbé asks. The museum has acknowledged that some of the skeletons in its collection may have been. “What does it mean if you print a skull of someone who was classified as Bushman?” L’Abbé adds.
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