San Diego

Allegations of an illicit trade in body parts at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), have forced the institution's authorities to rethink the systems used to collect human tissue for research.

UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine last week suspended its programme for accepting donated human bodies, after the arrests of an employee and an independent tissue broker. The pair are alleged to have participated in a scheme in which human body parts were supplied to biotechnology firms and research institutions.

The Willed Body Program, which receives annually about 175 cadavers for medical research and education, is a significant source of tissue for UCLA researchers, says urologist Thomas Rosenthal, associate vice-chancellor of the medical school. University officials say they are working out how to compensate for reduced access to human specimens.

Henry Reid, director of the programme, was arrested on 6 March on suspicion of grand theft. He is alleged to have allowed tissue broker Ernest Nelson to remove parts of nearly 500 cadavers from the university over the past six years. Invoices supplied by Reid show that he charged Nelson more than $700,000 for the body parts.

Rosenthal says a preliminary investigation indicates that Reid was not paying the money from Nelson into UCLA bank accounts. Reid, who coincidentally was hired by UCLA in 1997 to correct problems in handling cadavers, could not be reached for comment.

Nelson, who runs Empire Anatomical Services from a storage facility in a suburb of Los Angeles, shipped specimens to what his attorney, Greg Hafif, called “accredited research institutions” and US biotechnology firms. Hafif declined to name the companies, but Mitek Worldwide, a surgical-devices company based in Norwood, Massachusetts, has acknowledged receiving tissue from Nelson. Hafif says that Nelson is innocent of wrong-doing, as he believed he was working legitimately with UCLA.

Biotechnology companies and academic institutes need body parts for medical research and for training medical students. Although it is illegal to sell human body parts in the United States, firms can make a profit by charging to cover the costs of supplying specimens. A single human body can be parcelled out for thousands of dollars.

The UCLA irregularities come after similar instances in past decades at University of California medical facilities in San Diego and Irvine. Attempts over the years to enact stronger regulatory controls at the state and federal level have been stymied by a variety of political forces, including lobbying by institutions that want ready access to tissue.