Illegal profits drive trade in body parts

By Alan Zarembo and Jessica Garrison
Los Angeles Times

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive

LOS ANGELES — The trade in human body parts is a seller's market.

Pharmaceutical companies buy everything from fingernails to tendons to use for research.

Medical-instrument companies conduct training seminars for doctors, filling anatomy laboratories — or hotel-event rooms — with trays of knees or heads that surgeons can use to acquaint themselves with new devices and techniques.

Then there are at least 50 surgical products made from human skin, bones and heart valves that are used in procedures ranging from lip enhancements to fracture repairs.

Bodies also end up as crash-test dummies and are used in other product-safety research.

In all, the human-tissue industry is thought to be worth $500 million a year — and growing. The trade is supposedly nonprofit, since it is illegal to earn money from the sale of human body parts. But the law allows middlemen to cover their costs by charging "reasonable" fees.

Reasonable has become a matter of interpretation. As demand has expanded, so have prices — and the opportunities for fraud.

The alleged theft of body parts by employees at the University of California, Los Angeles, medical school is the latest in a series of scandals involving cadavers. Henry Reid, director of the university's willed-body program, was arrested Saturday at his home in Anaheim, Calif., on suspicion of grand theft for allegedly selling corpses and body parts for profit. He was released on $20,000 bail.

Three legal sources
 

There are three main, legitimate sources of bodies and parts.

The first are medical schools. In 1950, UCLA started the world's first willed-body program, pioneering the donation of one's body to science. There are now 154 such programs nationwide.

The vast majority of bodies — by one report up to 8,000 a year — are collected this way. The process is straightforward. A donor signs a consent agreement, and upon death, the school arranges to pick up the body. Schools often cover the cost of burial, or more often cremation, when they are finished.

Most cadavers are dissected by first-year medical students. But surplus bodies and parts can be sent to other scientific institutions, including for-profit biomedical corporations.

The schools are allowed to charge fees to cover administrative costs, salaries, preservation and storage. Such deals provide an important source of revenue for some anatomy departments.

In principle, all parts that go out must come back — in order that the ashes from the complete body can eventually be returned to the donor's family.

The second primary legal source of bodies has been more controversial.

Over the past decade, the tissue- and organ-bank industries have boomed. These institutions are considered nonprofit, and donors envision their parts being used only in altruistic endeavors. But many such banks, closely tied to for-profit companies, essentially sell body parts for commercial research and products.

The families of donors are not paid.

The final source of bodies is a tiny number of companies that set up their own willed-body programs in states that do not restrict such activities to medical schools. Such companies often work as contractors, setting up surgical-training seminars or product tests and providing well-paid experts to prepare the specimens.

Some university anatomists question the recruiting methods of such companies.

"They go in and raid retirement communities with the idea that people are donating their body to science in a humane act," said Arthur Dalley, who heads the anatomy department at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. "It's turned around and used for profit."

Skimming body parts

As prices have risen, some people who work closely with the dead have been unable to resist the temptation to skim off parts and sell them. By some estimates, a single body can be used to make products worth more than $200,000.

At medical schools, the task of procuring bodies, preserving them and keeping records often falls not to professors but to nonacademic technicians who trained as morticians or worked their way up through the ranks.

"We don't keep a count on bodies," said Carmine Clemente, a UCLA professor and longtime editor of the famous anatomy text "Gray's Anatomy."

Typically the technicians have been at the center of the cadaver scandals, as appears to be the case at UCLA.

At University of California, Irvine, medical school in 1999, Christopher Brown had an impressive title: director of the willed-body program. But he earned just $33,000 a year.

He was fired after it was discovered during a routine audit that he had charged the university for a trip to Phoenix and sold six spines to a hospital there for $5,000.

UCI auditors could account for only 121 of the 441 cadavers donated to the willed-body program for medical and scientific research from 1995 through 1999, indicating that there were record-keeping problems before Brown became head of the program. UCI could not identify four cadavers in its morgue.

In addition, families may have received the wrong remains or been improperly billed for the return of their relatives' ashes.

About 20 lawsuits against UCI are pending, but Brown was never prosecuted.

Neither was Allen Tyler, who headed the cadaver program at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. He lost his job in 2002 and was suspected of selling bodies. In a single transaction, he made more than $4,000 selling 232 fingernails and 35 toenails to a pharmaceutical company.

The scandal was still being investigated when he died of cancer in January.

Besides his duties at the medical school, Tyler freelanced in the tissue industry. He would help companies across the United States procure body parts, prepare specimens for seminars or, in the case of one client in Lake Elsinore, Calif., Michael Francis Brown, cut up bodies to be sold in pieces.

Brown had achieved synergy in the illegal body-parts trade. He ran three businesses: a funeral home, a crematory and a biotech company. Instead of cremating corpses — delivered from funeral homes and a Riverside County contract to cremate local indigents — he sold their heads, torsos and other parts.

In 2002, he pleaded guilty to 66 counts of unlawful mutilation. Prosecutors estimated that he stole parts from 133 bodies, earning $465,000 between 1999 and 2001.

He was later sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Such scandals spurred calls for better oversight.

UCI, for one, tightened its written procedures and policies, established an advisory group, created a system for tracking body parts, increased supervision and raised the salary for a new director.

Then-Gov. Gray Davis signed a bill in 2000 calling for better documentation of willed bodies and made it a crime to knowingly return the wrong remains to family members. It says that after body parts are used for medical research, the parts or their ashes are to be returned to relatives at no charge.

The law also requires coroners to receive consent from a representative of a dead person before releasing a body or body part for scientific purposes.

Another law that went into effect this year requires hospitals, organ-procurement organizations and tissue banks to advise donors of their right to prohibit their tissues from going to for-profit companies.

It is illegal to sell body parts for profit. But tissue brokers have found ways to make money.

"You can be paid money for handling fees, sterilizations, shaping the material," Arthur Caplan, professor of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania, said, adding that those prices can amount to "gouging."

Information on Henry Reid was provided by The Associated Press.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company