The University of California announced changes to its willed
body program at the UC Board of Regents meeting Wednesday, but
questions remain whether the university is capable of policing
itself.
Reforms to the program ““ which receives donated cadavers
for research purposes and was voluntarily suspended by the UC in
March 2004 ““ come more than nine months after the director of
UCLA’s willed body program was arrested for selling donated
body parts for profit. While university officials say they did
their best to make the necessary changes, others say they have
already failed their second chance.
“The crux of the issue is that you have a university
that’s been given time and time again to police itself, but
has shown the world it’s incapable of doing that,” said
Raymond Boucher, an attorney for families suing UCLA. Boucher and
other attorneys first filed a suit against UCLA in 1996, but after
Henry Reid, the program’s director, was arrested in March
2004, a new suit was filed against the university. “We have a
trial date in a couple of months. Whether we go to trial depends on
what safeguards will be put into place,” Boucher said, adding
that the reforms need to be “long standing and
significant.”
Some of the changes to the program will include increased
centralization and a new system of security reforms, including a
new position in the university president’s office, a new
software program, and electronic tracking devices that will be
planted in all of the donated cadavers.
“I think it’s absolutely paramount that the bodies
be used for education and research and be done in as dignified a
manner as possible. The Willed Body Program has to ensure that
there is adequate security and information to know exactly where
each of these anatomical materials are at any given time, and that
the system cannot be violated again as it has been in the
past,” said former Gov. George Deukmejian, who was appointed
by UC President Robert Dynes to oversee necessary reforms to
university willed body programs.
Deukmejian said all of the donor information traveling through
the programs will now be centralized, as will financial information
for the UC.
“In the past, it’s always been that each willed body
program operated rather independently on each campus. Now we are
beginning to coordinate all the programs into a system-wide willed
body program in order to ensure that all of the information is
known to the university,” he said.
New electronic security devices such as barcodes will also be
placed in each donated body, part of a new series of proposed
security measures to keep track of the cadavers.
Dr. David Taylor, executive director of medical services at the
UC Office of the President, said the UC is also trying to acquire
new computer software that would serve as a “digital donor
library,” to help solve the largest task of tracking and
locating donated cadavers.
The UC will also hire a person to fill a new position created
solely for overseeing willed body programs across the state, Taylor
said.
In all, the plan includes “more than four dozen fraud
protection enhancing steps, along with improved inventory control
and financial management,” according to the UCOP.
In addition to the 2004 scandal, donated bodies were handled
“without dignity” in the past, attorneys said.
In 1993, a waste container holding human ashes and other used
medical tools was found when it broke apart in the Santa Monica
Bay. Ashes had also been dumped in various other places in 1996 and
cadavers had been stuffed with other medical by-products in a
practice called “canoeing”, attorneys said.
Reid had been hired in 1997 to clean up the tainted program at
UCLA, but was arrested in March 2004 for grand theft and is accused
by the university of selling donated body parts.
Taylor stressed that despite the troubled history, the reforms
are designed to make California’s willed body programs
leading examples, noting that the bodies are “valuable”
and “precious.”
With reports from Natalie Banach, Bruin senior staff.