A US anatomy professor has been caught in the centre of a public storm over a live autopsy he performed on an elderly man who died of COVID-19, in front of a paying audience, without the permission of his family.

Professor Colin Henderson, a retired professor of anatomy from the University of Montana in Missoula, carried out the dissection on the 98-year-old in a hotel ballroom in Portland, Oregon, last month.

The event, run by a company called Death Science, attracted about 70 people who each paid up to $676 to attend.

However, the man’s widow said she had not been informed of the event.