Selling Bodies at UCLA

Cadavers for sale at UCLA? That's the charge:

The Los Angeles County district attorney's office announced criminal charges today against two men who allegedly ran a cadaver-trafficking scheme at UCLA's medical school, capping a three-year investigation that led to the temporary closure of the school's body donor program.

Henry Reid, 57, an embalmer who was director of the willed-body program from 1997 to 2004, was charged with conspiracy and grand theft for allegedly funneling donated bodies to a middleman, who then sold them to others for profit.

The middleman, Ernest Nelson, 49, was charged with conspiracy, grand theft and tax evasion. He has acknowledged cutting up about 800 cadavers and selling them to large medical research companies, including Johnson & Johnson; Nelson says the school authorized the sales, but UCLA officials say he was acting on his own.

Both Reid and Nelson were arrested today by UCLA police and are being held in lieu of $1 million bail each. Neither man could be reached for comment. They could be formally arraigned in a downtown criminal courtroom as early as Thursday.

-Art Caplan

Oh Yeah, Those Brains

Special prosecutor leads brain program inquiry, writes the (Portland) Maine Press Herald:

Maine Attorney General Steven Rowe has appointed a special prosecutor to direct the state's investigation of brain harvesting at the Medical Examiner's Office. The appointment of Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Murphy follows disclosures that members of Rowe's department had connections to the now-suspended program. Ninety-nine brains were sent to a Maryland lab that studies mental illness between 1999 and 2003, and numerous ethics and oversight problems have since been discovered.

- Arthur Caplan

Who Stole My Husband's Brain?

A report of the NHS in Britain today that at least 21,000 brains were harvested from deceased patients between 1970-1999. The study was motivated by a campaign by a woman from Manchester who discovered that her husband's brain was removed after he committed suicide in 1987. The study seems not to have provided any insight into the exact percentage of tens of thousands of brains that were harvested without consent, but it is clear that "there had been widespread failure to do so..." Researchers are fearful that the outrage concerning "stolen brains" will radically reduce the amount of brain tissue available in the U.K..