Word: ucla
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Lori Tilden was in the room when her sister Kim died of breast cancer in 1998. The loss was devastating, but Lori took some consolation from the fact that her sister, a mother of two, had lived long enough to bequeath her remains to the UCLA willed-body program, hoping that what researchers learned from her cadaver would help spare other children the pain of growing up without a mother...
...whole new kind of pain came last week, when Tilden learned of the arrest of Henry Reid, the director of the UCLA willed-body program, and Ernest Nelson, a former mortuary worker. Reid was arrested on suspicion of grand theft, and is thought to have illegally sold body parts for profit from some 500 cadavers in the UCLA cooler--Kim's possibly among them--to Nelson, who was arrested on suspicion of receiving stolen property. Nelson, who used a power saw to dismember the bodies, says he paid $700,000 for the parts and received fees to transfer them...
Everyone involved in the UCLA scandal was pointing fingers at everyone else, with UCLA saying it had known nothing of what Nelson and Reid were up to and the families of the donors filing suit against the university. Much more troubling was the impact the case could have--not on bodies already gone but on ones still to be pledged by living donors, who may now wonder if their largesse is such a good idea. "There's nothing more toxic to public altruism than this kind of scam," says Art Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics...
Until the system is reformed, donors have ways to look out for themselves. Demanding that all uses for tissue be spelled out in a contract is one option. Researching reputable organizations and donating only to them is another. It will take a long time before a possible malefactor like UCLA wins its good reputation back. Until then, the school may serve as a cautionary tale--for other universities and donors alike. --Reported by David Bjerklie and Sora Song/New York, Noah Isackson/Chicago, Ruth Laney/Baton Rouge and Sean Scully/Los Angeles
...hockey and baseball teams can play in national tournaments, but neither the Frozen Four nor the College World Series can match the hype and intensity of the Final Four. If Harvard upset a big-time basketball program like UCLA, a team of future NBA stars, it would be a shining moment in school history...