Scott Carney

I was getting my PhD in anthropology.

I lived in India for three years, learned Hindi, worked in some dicey areas over the years.

And I eventually realized I didn't want to be an academic because I didn't want to

write a book that four people would read you know for your dissertation committee and i could do uh anthropology in uh the popular formats right i could i consider having five people read my work i can have millions of people work read my work and apparently you would you've read some of my work you in wired you know i was contributing editor there for five years um

And I loved India and I wanted to just keep on going back to India.

And, you know, my first big story there was on the skeleton trade.

So, you know, you know, the skeletons that they're in your house.

right your uh doctor's office you know when a first year medical student says anatomy it's better to study on a real skeleton than a plastic skeleton and so where did those skeletons come from it's a it's a big question because you needed quite a few of them and so i uncovered i guess my first really big story and this was in 2000 i want to say seven it came out um was on the underground trade in human skeletons

where I found basically India had been exporting up to, not only India, Calcutta, just one city, was exporting 60,000 skeletons a year, which they were getting from grave robbing.

uh, it was eventually outlawed and I still track down that sort of like, no fingerprints that still exist in that world.

You know, I broke this, I was tracking where, you know, from the grave robber all the way back to the American medical programs that would purchase these skeletons.

And that was like my first story where I was like, I'm an investigative journalist.

Uh, and you know, I'm hanging out of the, like I snuck into Bhutan for that story, crossing the border.

I, you know, I was interviewing cops with

buckets of bones next to them.

It was a freaking wild time in my life.

And you can read that article right now on Wired.

I think it's still, I think Wired is free, maybe.

Maybe you get a free promo thing.

But it was called Inside the Underground Trade in Human Remains.