Wash. high court allows brain-harvesting lawsuit

The family of a man whose brain was harvested for mental health research when he died can pursue a lawsuit against King County as well as the institute that received the organ, Washington's high court ruled Thursday.

The state Supreme Court unanimously found that a lower court judge was wrong to dismiss all claims brought by the family of Jesse Smith, who died of heart problems in 2003 shortly after his 21st birthday.

Smith was an organ donor, and his mother, Nancy Adams, of Snoqualmie, said she and her husband consented by phone to providing brain tissue to the nonprofit Stanley Medical Research Institute of Maryland. Instead of taking a small tissue sample, however, the King County Medical Examiner's office provided the entire brain.

"This was devastating to her to find this out," Adams' lawyer, Steve Bulzomi, said. "It was hard enough to lose her son. To find out she was deceived on the worst day of her life, it was very, very difficult for her."

Stanley Research, with an endowment of over $300 million, created its brain bank in 1995 and calls itself the world's biggest private source of philanthropic support for psychiatric research. It has provided hundreds of thousands of brain-tissue samples to scientists around the world, and said in a statement issued last year that to its knowledge it has never obtained brains without full consent from next-of-kin.

But several families have disputed that. More than a dozen families in Maine have said they did not give consent for entire brains to be harvested, and a North Carolina woman also sued the King County Medical Examiner's Office, saying no such consent was given when her brother, Bradley Gierlich, died of a drug overdose in 1998. The Gierlich case is pending before the Washington Supreme Court.

Thursday's ruling clears the way for a trial in King County Superior Court on whether Adams consented only to the donation of a small tissue sample, as she contends. Bulzomi said she intends to seek damages for emotional distress.

Smith had no history of mental health problems. The institute collects such brains to use as controls for its studies.

The institute says it is necessary to have whole brains because there is a dearth of knowledge about where in the brain abnormalities associated with psychological problems are located.

Stanley Research and the medical examiner's office argued that Smith's status as an organ donor, established when he got his driver's license, allowed the harvesting of his brain for research. But in an opinion authored by Justice Susan Owens, the court held that Washington's Anatomical Gift Act - as it stood at the time - only authorized organ donations to hospitals, not research institutions, unless the deceased or next of kin specifically expressed other wishes.

The ruling barred some of Adams' claims, including one for fraud and another for invasion of privacy, but it allowed her to pursue claims of conspiracy and wrongful interference with a dead body.

Grant Degginger, a lawyer for the county and the institute who is also the mayor of Bellevue, said he was pleased that much of the lawsuit had been dismissed.

"It was undisputed that there was consent given, but there's a dispute about the extent of that consent," he said. "That's what we'll determine at trial."

Stanley Research paid for a pathologist in the King County Medical Examiner's Office from 1995 to mid-2004, and the office provided the institute with 255 brains.

Maine's high court ruled early this year that two of the lawsuits against Stanley Research in that state could go forward.