Answer to Scandal: Barcodes in Cadavers

By Charles Ornstein and Rebecca Trounson
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

 January 20, 2005

 SAN FRANCISCO — University of California medical schools would be required to implant barcodes or radio-frequency identifiers in cadavers, university officials said Wednesday as they announced a plan aimed at ending repeated scandals involving bodies donated to science.

 With reforms in place, officials said, they plan to ask a judge in March to reopen the body donor program at UCLA medical school, a year after it was temporarily closed. The suspension came after authorities uncovered the allegedly illegal sale of hundreds of cadavers at the school.

 Under the reform plan presented to the UC regents at their meeting here, the university would centralize the management of the willed body programs at its five medical schools and significantly strengthen security and recordkeeping.

 In addition to electronic identifiers implanted on the bones of cadavers or wired into them, campuses would also be required to install video cameras at loading docks to monitor after-hours activities involving cadavers.

 "You and I know that you can never be sure that you can prevent all criminal activity," Dr. Michael Drake, UC's vice president of health affairs, said in an interview. "But what we want to do is make it extremely difficult for the problems that have happened in the past to happen in the future. And we believe we have done that."

 But Mike Arias, an attorney representing people who have sued UCLA over how it handled cadavers, said he was skeptical about promises of reform.

 "I do believe the amount of public attention that this program has been under is really going to force them to do something that is more in line with what the public expects," Arias said.

 On the other hand, he added: "History tells us that you believe what somebody is going to do based on their past actions. And if you've been bitten a couple times, you have to stay away from that dog."

 UCLA's willed body program, the oldest in the country, received about 175 donated bodies every year and had a waiting list of more than 11,000 people who had agreed to donate their bodies for use by researchers and medical students.

 The bodies — worth thousands of dollars to biomedical firms — were stored in a large freezer on the seventh floor of UCLA Medical Center.

 When the program was suspended last spring, it was the third scandal in a decade at UC medical schools involving the misuse of bodies or body parts.

 In 1993, hazardous medical waste was discovered inside boxes of cremated human remains from UCLA. The operator of a funeral-at-sea business said the debris included broken parts of syringes, glass vials, clumps of used gauze and a rubber glove.

 At the time, UCLA acknowledged that the cremated remains were from the university's willed body program.

 In 1996, lawyers representing relatives of people whose bodies had been donated to the program sued UCLA's medical school and the UC regents, charging that the willed body program had illegally disposed of thousands of donated bodies since the 1950s.

 That lawsuit is pending.

 In 1999, UC Irvine fired Christopher Brown, the director of its program, amid suspicions that he had improperly sold spines from cadavers to an Arizona research program. The buyers paid $5,000 to a company owned by a business associate of Brown. An audit released in December 2000 found that Brown had misappropriated money and tried to cover it up. He denied any wrongdoing.

 In the most recent case, UCLA suspended its body-donor program last year after Henry G. Reid, the director, was arrested on suspicion of grand theft. University officials removed Reid and his assistant, Keith Lewis, for profiting from the sale of body parts.

 After the program's suspension, UCLA arranged to have the cadavers in its possession cremated. UCLA secured cadavers from other UC medical schools for dissection by medical students.

 UCLA police have not concluded their investigation, and Reid has not been charged. Lewis died last summer of an accidental drug overdose, according to the Los Angeles County coroner's office.

 Another man, Ernest V. Nelson, was also arrested on suspicion of profiting in his role as a middleman who resold the cadavers to major research corporations, including a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson. Nelson has not been charged.

 Nelson told The Times last year that he cut up about 800 bodies over six years with the full knowledge and permission of the university. He contended that he had done nothing wrong.

 Although it is illegal to earn a profit on body parts, Nelson said he had simply been charging for his labor, storage and handling.

 Nelson's attorney showed The Times invoices on UCLA letterhead, apparently from Reid, charging Nelson more than $700,000 for 496 cadavers over six years. UCLA has said it is not sure if the invoices are genuine and contended that its leaders knew nothing about the possible criminal activity.

 A raft of lawsuits against UCLA involving the scandal has been consolidated and is still in an early stage of litigation.

 After the scandal broke, university officials asked former Gov. George Deukmejian to oversee a reform plan. The university later brought in Navigant Consulting to help draft the details.

 Drake said the Navigant report would be released soon.

 Deukmejian urged implementation of the plan, "if the university is to avoid further embarrassing incidents and restore the trust of the donor community."

 Under the plan, each medical school would be required to create a cadaver anatomic advisory board that would meet at least once a year, consisting of an ethicist, a member of the public, campus officials and faculty.

 UC would set minimum rules for all its programs and would hire a high-ranking official in the Office of the President to keep watch over the campuses, Drake said. University auditors would perform more frequent reviews to detect potential wrongdoing.

 Some of the reforms have already been implemented, and most others are expected to be in place by May.

 Drake said the university has spent about $300,000 on consulting services, and staff members have devoted 5,000 hours to reforming the system. The campuses may spend an additional $1 million total on physical plant and security upgrades, and UC expects to spend at least $250,000 more every year on oversight, Drake said.

 Arthur F. Dalley II, director for medical gross anatomy at Vanderbilt University's school of medicine, said the changes unveiled by UC officials sound "pretty wide-sweeping."

 Dalley said the UCLA scandal caused harm to body donor programs nationwide. Donors even called Vanderbilt to cancel their donations.

 "There's a lot of public distrust out there, and people were feeling that their altruistic donations were being taken advantage of," he said. "What they were doing with all good intentions, somebody was turning around and making a profit from."

 Despite the changes introduced by UC officials, the security would not be as great as what is in place at Vanderbilt. There, cadavers are not dismembered, and they do not leave the campus except to go to other medical schools.

 Drake, however, said such a system would not work at UC. "We feel the most restrictive policies can stifle education and research," he said. "A model program to us is one that has the maximum degree of security with reasonable access to material for legitimate end users."