Actually, just last month, Harvard announced that the only book in their collection that they knew was bound in human skin was being rebound.
Prestigious Harvard University has removed human skin from the binding of a book held for over 90 years at one of its libraries.
www.abc.net.au
It was an old book - not related to this case, but the skin was taken from cadavers without consent, and they knew that. Which was wrong at any point in history, but Harvard decided to do something about it now.
It isn't just Nazis that did this stuff. And it's all about consent, really. There's someone that willed their skull to be used for productions of Hamlet. It was recently - I think David Tennant was the first actor who got to hold it and do the famous soliloquy on stage with it. There's Mary Shelley and her keeping her husband's heart. There's the long tradition of Victorian mourning jewellery, which is being revitalised in this century by people turning cremains into jewellery. It all comes down to consent. Those things I listed above were consensual. The stuff to do with the Harvard Medical school and the book in their collection was not consented to.
The whole point of donating your body to science is it's meant to be philanthropic. You're doing it with the aim of training the next generation of doctors and anthropologists and forensic scientists. You're not donating to Harvard medical expecting your skull to wind up on someone's mantel with a candle stuck in it. Some people would be okay with that, because they're not concerned with what happens to them after death, but it's not what they signed up for, so they have not consented to it, and they certainly did not sign off for someone to make a profit off their remains.
MOO