Evasion of the body snatchers

The captain of a small fishing boat got quite a scare when a box he had been hired to dump at sea turned out to contain a skull, syringes and other medical waste mixed with human ashes.

When the box broke open over the Pacific, so did a controversy over the disposal of human remains used by medical and dental schools for anatomy classes.

As many as 18,000 bodies donated to the University of California at Los Angeles for research were wrongfully cremated along with dead laboratory animals and foetuses in a campus incinerator and the ashes dumped in trash bins, according to lawsuits brought by relatives of the dead.

"They're devastated, literally devastated," said Raymond P. Boucher, who represents many of the family members. "You want to believe it when UCLA says, 'Please help us to help others and donate your body to medical science. We assure you that it will be disposed of in a proper and dignified manner'." In fact, UCLA's medical school sent the cremated remains of thousands of people to the city dump, he said.

"Somewhere out there is Mom or Dad or son or daughter," Mr Boucher said. "It creates nightmares for them."

In response to the lawsuit, UCLA officials promised to treat corpses with respect. They said all human remains were now being cremated and buried in the El Toro Cemetery in Torrance, California, or returned to their families.

James Terwilliger, vice provost for administration at the university's medical school, said: "Anyone who is considering a donation of their body to scientific research at UCLA can rest assured that the donation will be treated with dignity and compassion."

Such reassurance reflects concern that the supply of 160 bodies needed annually to teach anatomy to first-year medical students at UCLA may be interrupted. "It's so critical that the students have cadavers," said Mr Terwilliger at an annual remembrance service organised by students for people who donated their bodies.

Most universities today depend on willed remains from voluntary donors, rather than hospital charity wards. Importing bodies from one part of the country to another to meet gaps in the supply costs at least $1,000 each, and there are stories of universities spreading a wide net to make up for deficits and deans driving through the night with trucks full of cadavers.

Mr Boucher is sure the UCLA case will make people hesitate before they give their bodies to medicine. "It's a likely and unfortunate reaction but I think it's certainly going to have a ripple effect," he said. "While none of the families wants to set medical science back or impede progress, they also want to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again."