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Revamped donated body program up and running

BY CYNTHIA LEE
Today Staff Writer

Working closely with its sister institution, UC Irvine, UCLA has begun accepting bodies into its completely revamped donated body program, said Associate Dean Allen Nissenson, the administrator who represents Dean Gerald Levey of the Geffen School of Medicine in the day-to-day management of the program.

To ensure greater accountability and maximum transparency, the organizational structure will have two levels of oversight and dual reporting lines between the campuses and systemwide office.

“The idea here is not to denigrate the ability of one academic department to be responsible,” Nissenson explained. “Because of the legal issues that have come up, it was strongly felt in Oakland that there needed to be a higher level of accountability, and that it needed to rest in the Dean’s Office.”

And the Dean’s Office has made the revamping of UCLA’s program, now called the Donated Body Program, a top priority, Nissenson said.

Budgeted for 2006 at just over $1 million (which will not cover construction costs), the program will be housed in a renovated facility equipped with security cameras that can be monitored locally or tapped into remotely by UC police. Software will track every step in the process, from initial contact with a donor to final disposition of a cadaver, and scanners will read tiny glass radio frequency transmitters that will be embedded in all anatomical materials. UCLA Professor Rajit Gadh in the engineering school is helping adapt the radio frequency identification technology for that use.

“Nothing is ever perfect,” Nissenson said, “but the improvements we have made in these programs go a long way toward making it much less likely that mischief is going to occur in the future.”

The criminal case is still under investigation by the UC Police Department. Preliminary investigation led to last year’s arrests of Henry Reid, then-program director, on suspicion of grand theft, and of businessman Ernest Nelson, arrested on suspicion of receiving known stolen property. Both men have never been charged, and both have denied the allegations.

Campus officials have become even more convinced of the program’s central importance to the core missions of the university, Nissenson said. While UCLA medical and dental students were able to obtain anatomical materials from the other UC medical schools during the suspension, UCLA researchers had to either put their work aside or work at other medical campuses. “We hope we will get these people back on track very quickly,” Nissenson said.

Donors, he said, have shown by their responses that they understand that what happened last year has nothing to do with the valuable contribution they are making.

That echoes the sentiments of Anne Koza, who plans to enroll in the program. “UCLA is obviously one of the top schools in the world,” she said. “I am sure the medical, anatomy and other programs that use willed bodies are very good. So it makes me feel that I am doing something worthwhile with my remains.”