Two prison sentences. Multiple lawsuits from horrified family members. A bag of unidentified body parts.
The downfall of the UCLA Willed Body Program, the country’s first program to accept dead bodies for medical research, began when the director of the program, Henry Reid, sold hundreds of cadavers from the university’s morgue.
For five years, middleman “body broker” Ernest Nelson paid Reid in cash and cashier’s checks for cadaver parts. Nelson visited UCLA’s medical center two times a week to saw off pieces of the bodies, store them in coolers and cart them to a rented warehouse until he could find a buyer.
Reid had a constant stream of revenue – an average of 175 people had been donating their bodies to UCLA annually around the time of the scandal. Pieces of those people were shipped out to more than 20 private research corporations – most notably, multinational company Johnson & Johnson – for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
At the end of a three-year investigation, the program could not account for hundreds of bodies and had bags of unidentified appendages, like hands and feet. Nelson had netted more than $1 million.
Reid and Nelson were arrested in March 2004. Reid pled guilty to the charges and was sentenced to four years and four months. Nelson was sentenced to 10 years.
When the illegal activities became public, the news made national headlines and the body donation program, which had accepted bodies since the 1950s, shut down for more than a year.
Donating your body to science is a relatively new concept. Until recently, having your corpse splayed out for medical students was considered punishment, not a gift.
An English law titled the Murder Act of 1752 made it possible to punish high crimes by dissection. The United States later adopted a similar law as a provision of the Crimes Act of 1790, allowing judges to add dissection onto a death sentence.
While the execution was a threat to one’s life, dissection was an assault to one’s soul.
The need for cadavers quickly outpaced the number of executed criminals after universities started offering anatomy classes. Many resorted to buying bodies from grave robbers – sometimes, medical students and doctors dug up the bodies themselves.
This practice ended after the public started seeing familiar faces on the surgery table. Once, at the Ohio Medical College, visitors found the body of a U.S. senator. The public became so angry at anatomists that, in 1788, a mob ran into New York Hospital and beat medical students, according to a piece by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
The protest ultimately ended in the death of three rioters and three militiamen. Shortly after, New York passed a law against grave-robbing.
Over time, the stigma against postmortem dissection decreased, and some prominent physicians and wealthy individuals made it a point to donate their bodies, such as the wealthy horse dealer Thomas Orne, who donated his body in 1899.
In the 1950s, UCLA established the first willed-body program in the world.
Horace Magoun, the chair of the anatomy department at the UCLA School of Medicine at the time, made an announcement in the Daily Bruin: More than 100 people had donated their bodies to the university.
Though most people would not be able to gift large sums of money to the medical school, which had opened just prior to the program, the donation of bodies for teaching and research was a splendid contribution to medical progress, he wrote.
By signing a statement provided by the anatomy department, anyone 18 years or older could donate their body for use after death.
Two years later, Magoun said UCLA had received almost 300 bequests, and about 80% of the bodies used to teach medical students were willed. By 1955, the program had received enough will forms to fill the school’s needs for 30 years and temporarily stopped taking bequests.
Other universities followed suit and established their own body donation programs – today, almost every major research university has one.
But the body program that revolutionized cadaver practices has been riddled with scandal.
In 1993, a funeral-at-sea director in Santa Monica Bay, who was contracted by UCLA, found a mix of gauze, glass vials and a rubber glove in the ashes of a container for cremated remains. The revelation occurred amid investigations by a local environmental group into allegations UCLA had been illegally dumping into the bay for 22 years, according to the Daily Bruin.
A man who brought UCLA cadavers to the crematorium in the mid-1990s testified that when bodies couldn’t be cremated because they weren’t identified, UCLA employees simply cut off their heads, according to the Los Angeles Times. Bodies without heads are exempt from being identified.
Soon after, families of cadaver donors sued UCLA for throwing their loved ones’ ashes in dumpsters and landfills.
UCLA settled with the California Department of Health Services in 1994 and agreed to rework its policies for handling donated bodies, according to the LA Times.
Then, 10 years later, the news broke that Reid was selling body parts.
While Reid and Nelson were both convicted by grand juries and sentenced to prison time, the state Supreme Court ruled in 2010 the university had no legal obligation to the families of the deceased whose remains were abused. The dozens of family members who had filed suits against the UC Regents were left without restitution.
In the year following the scandal, stakeholders in the program, attorneys and risk specialists held a series of meetings to discuss policies that would prevent abuses, like the ones committed by Reid and Nelson, of the program in the future.
Brandi Schmitt, the former interim director of UCLA’s Donated Body Program and the current director of anatomical services for the University of California Office of the President, was hired by UCOP about a year after UCLA’s willed-body program shut its doors.
Schmitt said the mood across the UC system’s programs after the news broke was heart-wrenching.
“People who work in the donor program have dedicated their careers and their professional reputations to running a body donation program, where people in the community are gifting their bodies to us,” she said.
Throughout the following year, each body donation program in the UC system was audited by an internal auditing service, and a consulting agency was hired to personally oversee the body donation process, Schmitt said.
The meetings included a large leadership group, including a former governor of California, who met with staff members to talk through the specifics of the program. The staff members were tasked with explaining their roles in the body donation process, down to their day-to-day obligations.
Schmitt suggested implementing a standardized system for tagging and tracking bodies and body parts for donors. This system exists in the donation process at UCLA today, according to the Anatomical Donation/Materials Programs policy guide.
The Digital Donor Library, or the Anatomical Materials Registry, manages and tracks “anatomical preparation, handling, inventory management, allocation, and disposal of anatomical materials,” according to the guide.
The actual mechanisms of the library’s tracking system – what materials are used to track the bodies, what details fall under which stage of the bodies’ preparation or who records what information – are not specified.
Schmitt said employees who stayed on after the program’s policy changes are extremely dedicated to the work they do. The technical aspects of the job, the day-to-day handling and sorting of cadavers, are not easily divorced from the lives of the bodies themselves.
“Working in a body donation program, I’ll say, is not a job suited for everybody. It’s not the kind of job where you go to work and you can just leave it behind,” Schmitt said. “You deal with people’s loved ones, people’s grief, people’s medical histories and all sorts of very personal issues, and so it really takes someone who’s dedicated.”
Of course, UCLA’s program knows the body donation field suits some people better than others.
While it is easy to talk about how emotionally draining the job can be, it’s hard to account for Reid and Nelson’s overt apathy. For now, the insensitivity that allowed the pair to take advantage of the trust invested in the program by hundreds of willing donors is a mystery not likely to be solved.
The scandal has not deterred everyone from donating their bodies, though.
William Grisham, a behavioral neuroscientist and adjunct professor at UCLA, said he plans on donating his body to the university.
"(I’m) beyond interested," he said. "I've already done the paperwork."
He sees donating his body as a sort of symbolic gesture – a fitting end to a career filled with cadavers.
“Someone did this great act for me to give me the privilege of studying their body,” he said. “I want to pass it on to future students.”
He said he hopes his brain ends up back in the psychology department, where he uses donated human brains to teach neuroanatomy in his behavioral neuroscience laboratory class.
Grisham has three brains on loan from the UCLA Donated Body Program. He keeps them in containers with preservatives and takes the formaldehyde-scented organs out for demonstrations during class or exams.
Despite their smell, the brains, Grisham said, are priceless, and while artists do a wonderful job making models and drawings, nothing can beat seeing the real thing.
On models, the grooves are deep and obvious, while on a real brain the big central sulcus might blend right in with all of the other folds. On a model, the artery that brings blood into the brain is usually red and exaggerated. On a real brain, one can hardly see it.
Grisham is careful to treat each brain with the utmost respect. Each brain has to stay with a brass label that identifies it. While students can take pictures of sheep brains to study the anatomy, taking pictures of the human brains is strictly forbidden.
"You can't do things like take a selfie with the human brain,” Grisham said. “It's somebody's remains and you have to be respectful.”
Grisham said he doesn’t believe he’ll have any consciousness after he has died. Still, the body-selling scandal in 2004 deeply disturbs him.
“It's an abomination that should have never happened,” Grisham said. “It was disturbing, very disturbing to hear.”
Jay Phelan, an academic administrator in life sciences who also plans to donate his body to UCLA, is less concerned about his body parts being misused. He said he doesn’t attach any particular significance to his body once he’s dead.
He’s more concerned that, because of the size of the classes he teaches, some of his former students will see him as a cadaver. Because of his excessive sun exposure, Phelan says he’s fairly confident he would be used as an example of damaged skin for medical students.
“That might be weird if I donate my body (and a student) was like, ‘Oh no, this is Professor Phelan,’” he said.
Rhonda Murotake, a laboratory administrator in the life sciences department who helped Phelan purchase a human brain for his class, said it is nearly impossible to get human remains because of the new strict regulations on the treatment of bodies.
Murotake said the brains she uses are kept locked somewhere on campus.
“And I'm not going to tell you where that is,” she added.