Web Site Provided 1st Clue to UCI Cadaver Problems

It was a lucky click of a computer mouse that led UC Irvine supervisors to wonder whether something might be amiss with their Willed Body Program.

Surfing the Internet in June, the chairman of the department that oversees the program stumbled upon a site touting an anatomy course at a nearby private learning center. The company said it used human cadavers for students hoping to enter medical school.

Wondering how a private school could obtain bodies, which are usually restricted to higher learning and medical institutions, department Chairman Richard T. Robertson asked a colleague to call the company, Replica Notes. The supplier, Robertson said his friend was told, was Robertson’s own department.

“That was my first inkling that something was wrong,” Robertson, the chairman of UC Irvine Medical School’s department of anatomy and neurobiology, said Monday. “I couldn’t imagine how it would be legal to do that, how this private company would get a human body . . . It just seems macabre.”

The Web page discovery followed a recent routine audit, which hinted at possible bookkeeping problems with the program, but failed to uncover the scope. Robertson said he was also suspicious of a trip the program’s director, Christopher S. Brown, had just made to Arizona.

Acting quickly, Robertson asked for a formal investigation into the program. Last week, the university announced that staff may have failed to return cremated remains to families and that Brown had been fired.

Brown has told The Times that he did nothing wrong. The district attorney’s office is investigating whether staff violated any criminal laws.

University officials said they have no evidence that bodies were supplied to Replica Notes, but also acknowledge that the program’s poor record-keeping hinders any attempt to find out which institutions received bodies. Replica Notes operates from offices in a shopping mall opposite UCI and teaches science lessons--including a gross anatomy class--and sells copies of lecture notes to students, according to its Web site.

UCI investigators are trying to determine whether Brown had a financial interest in any of the companies that worked with the program. They are also looking at whether the owner of Replica Notes had an interest in two transportation companies that provided services to the UCI program.

One of the companies, Harry’s Transport, had a contract to transport the program’s cadavers to other medical and educational institutions until June, university officials said.

California secretary of state records list Jeffrey Frazier as the owner of Harry’s and Replica Notes. For a short time last year, Brown was also a part owner of Harry’s.

The second transportation company, University Health Services, was paid $5,000 for the delivery of six spines to an Arizona hospital for medical research--a payment that should have been made to UCI, university officials contend.

University Health Services shares the same address--just off UCI’s campus--as Harry’s, according to a spokeswoman at St. Joseph Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix.

Frazier was not available for comment Monday, despite repeated attempts by The Times to reach him.

Investigators at the district attorney’s office and the university are focusing their efforts on the alleged sale of body parts to St. Joseph’s, but the probe may expand.

“It could be more widespread than it appears on the surface, but the investigation will discover that,” said district attorney’s spokeswoman Tori Richards.

Meanwhile, university officials said they are trying to restore records and implement safeguards to prevent such problems in the future.

UCI receives about 75 cadavers a year for use in research. It uses 50 to 55 of them, and the rest are sent to other colleges and hospitals, which pay a preparation fee. Only a small percentage of donors ask that their remains be returned to their families.

By late Monday, about 30 people had called the UCI hotline set up late last week to field calls from relatives of donors.

Only six of the calls were from people whose relatives might have been affected by the program’s poor record-keeping, according to the university.

* NEGATIVE FALLOUT?

Medical experts worry that UCI publicity may hamper much-needed donations. A15