by Annie Cheney
It’s common for medical schools with a surplus of donated bodies to share them with other schools. While the supplying schools don’t always tell donors about this possibility, most medical schools try to carry out the exchange as respectfully as possible. Ideally, a school in need contacts a school with a surplus and together they negotiate the exchange. The supplying school is given approval over how the bodies are used, when and by whom they are transported and later cremated. Together, the schools establish a fair price to reimburse the supplying school for the costs of preparing and storing the bodies. Usually, these fees are nominal.
But in some cases, schools with a surplus of corpses hire middlemen to broker the bodies for them. Brokers are willing to buy bodies in bulk. They pick the bodies up, carry them away, find customers for them—sometimes recycling a single body for use by multiple customers—and dispose of the remains.
Donors and their families do not expect money to be made from their donations. But when a school sells bodies to a broker, there’s no way to ensure this expectation is met. By nature, brokers are businessmen and thus, once they’ve paid for a corpse, they feel entitled to make a profit. When a school sells a body to a broker, the school has no control over how the body will be used, or when and by whom, and how much the buyers will be charged.
Still, using brokers is a great way for a school to generate income. Some medical schools regularly engage in business with body brokers. The University of Texas Southwestern, the University of Kansas School of Medicine, Washington University School of Medicine, Tulane School of Medicine, and Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in Shreveport have all worked with body brokers.
One broker who has done a brisk business with medical schools is John Vincent Scalia, who owns the John Vincent Scalia Home for Funerals on Staten Island. Until April 2004, he also owned an outfit called National Anatomical Service. Since the 1970s, Scalia has held a highly profitable monopoly on surplus university cadavers. In addition to brokering deals between schools, Scalia has sold body parts to doctors, to a crematorium in Chicago, and to other brokers.
Scalia is discreet about the service he provides and about his university clients. In a 2002 interview, he claimed to be out of the cadaver trade entirely. Meanwhile, that same year, he sold the military nine bodies for $37,485.
Steve Rountree was his Army contact. Rountree had been hired to find dead bodies for Colonel Robert Harris, a renowned Army surgeon who needed the bodies to test ballistic armor for humanitarian deminers who work detonating mines all over the world. The bodies had to be fresh, male, and under seventy-two years old.
Such bodies are hard to come by.
Luckily, John Vincent Scalia was more than happy to help out. As is customary, Scalia disclosed little to Rountree about his operation. Rountree didn’t even know that Scalia owned a funeral home. He did know that the bodies Scalia sold him came from Louisiana State University and Tulane School of Medicine.
On the surface, this was a perfectly reasonable scenario: two medical schools collaborating with the Army to save the lives of deminers. If anyone should provide cadavers to the Army, a medical school is a logical choice. But the Army still needs consent from the donors and their families. If the deal is done right, the school and the Army work together, finding a suitable mode of transportation and agreeing on a reasonable fee to get the bodies to and from Louisiana. The Army might reimburse the school for the cost of storing the bodies and preparing them for the journey.
But that was not the case here. The Army had signed a contract with a body broker. LSU and Tulane were peripheral.
Founded in 1834 as the Medical College of Louisiana, Tulane is the second-oldest medical school in the Deep South and the first school of its kind in Louisiana. A group of young, idealistic doctors founded the school after arriving in New Orleans and finding the city plagued by cholera and overrun with poorly trained physicians. Pooling their resources, Dr. Thomas Hunt, Dr. John Hoffman Harrison, Dr. Charles Luzenberg, and Dr. Warren Stone established the school hoping to “advance the cause of science,” according to their announcement in the local newspaper.
Anatomy was the centerpiece of the new school’s curriculum. “How can he repair the derangements of structures, who does not know what structure is?” Dr. Hunt asked in a speech to the first freshman class. The school offered dissection courses regularly. Unlike anatomy professors in some parts of the country, the professors at Tulane had no trouble obtaining corpses. There were plenty of bodies to be had from the charity hospital.
The Medical College of Louisiana went on to become one of the finest medical schools in the country. It has produced some of the great medical innovators of our time, like Michael E. DeBakey, who pioneered the artificial heart. Years of success have inspired loyalty and enthusiasm among neighbors and alumni, many of whom have donated their bodies to the school’s very successful willed-body program. While some schools suffer from perennial cadaver shortages, Tulane gets many more bodies than it needs.
Tulane University Medical School has supplied National Anatomical Service with corpses for more than a decade. Tulane charged Scalia $960 for each corpse. Scalia then resold the bodies at his own rate. Those he sold to the Army he marked up by more than 400 percent.
When I reached him by phone in 2002, Dr. Gerald Kirby, who was then chairman of the Anatomy Department, denied knowing anything about National Anatomical Service. “I don’t know what National Anatomical Service does,” he said. But later, he acknowledged using them. “NAS works as a broker, which is very useful for us. One-third of the bodies we receive are brokered by National Anatomical Service,” he said. Then he paused. “Brokered sounds bad, doesn’t it? I don’t know what the right word is.”
Many people wouldn’t sell any gift they were given—not even a dress or a pair of shoes. But some universities think nothing of selling bodies. People who donate their bodies to a school like Tulane expect their bodies to be helping first-year medical students at Tulane. Donors often have an emotional attachment to a particular school and would never have willingly donated their body to another school. The schools know this well, which is why they are so loath to admit that they sell bodies to outsiders.
Kirby wouldn’t reveal how many bodies the school receives every year. “If that’s something that becomes public, people might say, ‘You’re getting too many, we’re not going to donate,’” he said. But according to a BBC report, Tulane receives about 150 bodies every year. If one-third of them are brokered every year, as Kirby claims, then as many as 500 Tulane donors may have entered the underground cadaver trade over the last ten years.
When word of Tulane’s dealings with the Army hit the news, the public reacted with outrage, just as Kirby had feared. “You know what’s the worst of it for me?” one woman told a reporter at the Times-Picayune. “My father’s got this image of the woman he loved being blown up by the Army.” Another woman said, “That made me ill, the idea of the fees and the money collected. . . . It smacked of the 1800s and grave robbing.”
Rather than address the families’ concerns, Scalia feigned ignorance. In one interview with the New York Post, he denied ever selling bodies to the Army, claiming instead that he had deposited the bodies at a Virginia medical school, which then passed them on to the Army without his knowledge. He claimed he did business only with universities.
Tulane officials also denied knowing that the bodies were going to the Army. But Dr. Kirby had approved this very transfer himself. “I got a call from Colonel Baker in the summer,” Kirby said. “He asked me if I thought it was appropriate to use the cadaver for that purpose. My first reaction was ‘No, this is medical stuff,’ and then I said, ‘Hey, this is right on! This is prophylactic medicine.’”
Kirby said that Colonel Baker had asked him if he thought they should call the families and get their permission before blowing up their loved ones.
Kirby said he had thought about it and had replied, “Nah, nah. Ugly.”
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��It’s much better if there isn’t any possibility of irrational speculation,” he later explained.
Land mine experiments are just one example of what became of some Tulane donors. In 2003, June Reynolds donated her husband, Charley, to Tulane. A brilliant, eccentric engineer, Charley had always wanted to donate his body to science. Tulane was a natural choice. As a college senior, Charley was invited to apply to the medical school because of his exceptional grades. He became an engineer instead. But now, he would finally get to go. At seventy-nine, he was an excellent specimen: six feet two, lean and muscular, like a teenage athlete.
The donation went smoothly. Charley died on a Sunday. On Wednesday, someone from the school came to pick him up at the funeral home. When June Reynolds called the school later that day, Tulane’s diener, Kenneth Webb, told her that her husband’s body had been embalmed and was all set to be used in an anatomy course.
One year later, Reynolds read an article about Tulane and the Army in the Times-Picayune and grew concerned. After several frustrating phone calls back and forth to Tulane during which, she said, she got the impression that “people either didn’t know where Charley was or they didn’t want to tell me,” she finally learned that her husband’s body had never been embalmed. In fact, the school had frozen him and sold him to National Anatomical Service. Two and a half months after Charley died, National Anatomical picked him up, drove him to Detroit, and dumped him at Arthur Rathburn’s headquarters. Rathburn had slated Charley for a hip-replacement course at a resort in Vail, Colorado.
The family was devastated, but Charley’s daughter also recalled a sweet irony. Her father had always loved to travel. He’d lived all over the world, in some of the most primitive places, and he had never needed much to feel at home: just a cot, a car, and an airplane to get around. “He would try to come home to live,” she said, “but he was too restless, so he would be off again as soon as possible. The fact that we all thought he was over at Tulane quietly being a contribution, and then found out that he had been at least two or three other places—it was just the sort of thing that would happen with Dad.”
Charley would have probably enjoyed a trip to Vail, but his family was desperate to get his body back. “Something limbic, something primordial comes up,” his daughter Jane said. “We had to keep at it until we got him home.” Fortunately, they got to Charley in time. He was waiting peacefully in cold storage in Detroit.
June Reynolds was grateful to have her husband back. But she’s still suspicious of the whole process. “Every time we got some information, it was erroneous.”
Tulane got most of the attention, but Louisiana State University was also selling bodies to Scalia. In 2002, Scalia, who pays LSU $600 for each cadaver, sold five LSU bodies to the Army for more than $20,000. LSU has been making quite a bit of money from donated cadavers—$246,200, to be exact, between 1998 and 2004—and that is just from transfers to National Anatomical Service. Most of the money appears to have gone to the department of Cellular Biology and Anatomy. The chairman of the department, Dr. Leonard Seelig, told me that the cadaver fees simply cover their costs. But one NAS check was made out to the mysteriously named “Anatomy Club Fund.” No such club exists at LSU. Seelig offered two different explanations for how he used the money. First, he claimed the money went to pay the living expenses of international students. Later, he said he used it to pay students to clean out the cadaver tanks, though this is usually the diener’s job.
Seelig, who says he has obtained all of the necessary clearance to send bodies out of state, doesn’t see any problem with hiring a broker to distribute surplus cadavers. “We have had problems throughout the years with many people who donate their bodies, but I’ve never had any problem with John Scalia.”
This is not surprising, since Seelig told me that he doesn’t concern himself with the particulars. He sells bodies and gets back ashes. He never investigates where the bodies end up, nor does he know where Scalia does the cremations. “John Scalia takes care of that, and I just take his word for it. He has assured me that they go to other medical centers.”
LSU has, in essence, become a corpse wholesaler, but there is some confusion about whether or not this is an acceptable practice. When I called LSU’s Director of Accounting Services, Janie Binderim, she appeared to be unaware of the cadaver sales. She says it would be illegal for the school to sell bodies. “As a nonprofit institution, we cannot generate revenue.” As an example, she offered the case of one of the school’s research departments, which proposed leasing some of its equipment to an outside company. “We had to tell them that they can’t do that. We’re a charity institution,” she said. “We encourage people to donate their bodies, but we don’t go out to sell those bodies to earn additional income.” For his part, John Scalia strongly objects to being called a broker and says he simply gets paid for transporting cadavers.
Binderim added that even if the Anatomy Department was simply transferring the bodies elsewhere and being reimbursed for its costs, it would still be a violation of the school’s accounting policy. “It really doesn’t have to do with whether you make a profit. If we obtain revenue that is not part of our original mission, which, as a charity hospital, is to take care of indigent patients, then we are subject to an unrelated business tax.”
Not only do the cadaver sales appear to violate the mission of Louisiana State University, but they also violate Louisiana state law, which prohibits the transfer of any body out of state unless the body is being used for education by a doctor licensed in Louisiana or by an employee of a Louisiana medical school. The penalty is a $200 fine or imprisonment for not more than one year. But the Louisiana attorney general has no plans to investigate.
Tulane claims to have cut all ties with Scalia, but LSU continues to do business with his company, despite outcries from the public. Scalia, meanwhile, has dissolved National Anatomical Service and surrendered the license granted to him by the New York State Department of Health. Technically, National Anatomical Service no longer exists, but John Vincent Scalia is still very much in business. As of this writing, he has continued to buy corpses from the University of Kansas. But without a license or a legitimate registered company, he’s operating more covertly than ever.
In June 2004, the American Association of Clinical Anatomists met on the picturesque campus of Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California. Hundreds of anatomists had come from all over the world. They were a serious, thoughtful bunch—predominantly men dressed in button-downs and khakis.
The scandals at UCLA and Tulane had just broken, and the mood at the conference was tense. On the first day, two anatomists could be seen sitting outside the auditorium on a stone bench in the shade. They sat with their hands clasped, their anxious gazes fixed on the sunburnt hilltops in the distance.
It had been fourteen years since the members of the AACA met in Saskatchewan to discuss body brokers. Since then, it seemed that more and more willed-body programs were being exploited by companies, greedy dieners, and even medical schools themselves. In response to the most recent scandals, the AACA had dedicated an entire morning session to the issue of the underground traffic. They invited Louis Marlin, the lawyer representing UCLA in the body-brokering case, an auditor from UC Irvine Medical School, which had recently revamped its donor program after a body-theft scandal in 1999, and a representative from the California Department of Health.
In a separate meeting, members of the original 1990 group drafted specific recommendations for donor programs, including a recommendation that the willed-body programs be properly supervised by faculty and that there be an approval process for outsiders requesting specimens. It was clear that this group was anxious to do the right thing, to educate its members, and to ensure that donor programs around the country honored the wishes of the people who had so generously given their bodies.
But there was also a sense of despair and frustration among the AACA members. As one man pointed out, the organization has no authority to enforce i
ts recommendations. The anatomists can’t police each other, let alone the surgical equipment companies that work with brokers. Anatomists have become the gatekeepers to a lucrative commodity. Yet so long as there was little state regulation, no federal oversight, and a market for body parts, the incidents of profiteering and theft would continue to plague their schools.
“People who believe that all it’s going to take is each individual school creating policies and hiring people with integrity are kidding themselves,” said one California anatomist. “These third-party people are not operating under the same sort of understanding we are about educating people. They’re in business.”
For all of the efforts of organizations like the AACA to wrestle with the underground trade in corpses, the surgical-equipment companies have been largely silent. In the case of UCLA, Johnson & Johnson admitted that one of its subsidiaries, DePuy Mitek, bought body parts from broker Ernest Nelson between 1996 and 1999. But the company claims that it “did not knowingly receive samples that may have been obtained in an inappropriate way.”
“We take the matter of using human tissue samples for medical research and education very seriously,” Sarah Colamarino, a spokesperson, wrote in an e-mail. “DePuy Mitek follows all applicable regulatory requirements and guidelines in using anatomical specimens for medical research and education.”
But how could they not have known? Nelson claimed to represent the University of California system of medical schools, but he was never in the school’s employ and worked out of his home. The serology reports detailing blood test results from the body parts that he supplied to clients resembled something a child might create from a Microsoft Word template, complete with a microscope logo, as if microscopes were used to test for HIV and hepatitis C. Viruses are simply too small to be detected under a regular microscope. In fact, labs use special kits, not microscopes, to test for the antibodies that the body produces as a result of infection with viruses like HIV. Nowhere on the reports was the name of the lab where the so-called testing was done. There was no federal lab ID number or medical director listed as the law requires. Even to a layperson, the paperwork Nelson supplied would have been suspect.
