Maine cadaver sales in tight rein University of New England aims to avoid scandal that rocked UCLA

BIDDEFORD – The overseer of Maine’s only body-donor program says tight controls are the key to preventing the kind of cadavers-for-sale scandal that rocked the University of California at Los Angeles.

About 70 to 80 cadavers are donated each year to the University of New England College of Osteopathic Medicine. Dr. Neal Cross, who teaches gross anatomy, said about one-third of the cadavers end up being sent to other medical institutions.

No bodies go to for-profit businesses, Cross said, and his lab maintains control over the cadavers, ensuring that cremated remains are returned for burial on the school’s Biddeford campus once the research is completed.

“In Maine we have a very strict program, which is good,” Cross said. “We haven’t lost anybody – or part of anybody – in 25 years.”

That apparently wasn’t the case at other schools.

At UCLA, the director of the program that makes donated bodies available for medical education and research was arrested earlier this month in an investigation of dealing in stolen body parts.

Reports also surfaced last week that Tulane University sold cadavers to an out-of-state broker, who resold them for the Army to use in land-mine experiments.

“We just cringe when this kind of thing happens. And in the last 10 years, it seems we’ve had more of it,” Cross said.

With little outside scrutiny, it often falls to medical institutions to build internal systems of checks and balances.

Cross, who started the body donation program at UNE, has authority over the medical school’s disbursement of bodies. Charging a fee that covers costs, he currently sends cadavers to Husson College in Bangor, Northeastern University in Boston, and Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

Cross doesn’t control the program’s budget, and that separation acts as a safeguard against improprieties, he said.

“It comes down to the individual programs. There needs to be institutional oversight,” Cross said.

Others connected to the UNE program say bodies have always been handled scrupulously.

“We get them, and we give them back,” said Ben Sidaway, a physical therapy professor at Husson. “Every last bit is accounted for.”

“The program has grown and been very successful,” said Marc Bolduc of Hope Memorial Chapel in Biddeford, who has transported bodies for the program for many years. “From the get-go, it’s kind of been a sacred thing.”

The success of UNE’s program during the last quarter-century may stem, at least in part, from the reverence it gives to donors.

Each fall, the medical school holds a memorial service on campus to honor those who have given their bodies to science. Medical students, faculty members and relatives of some of the deceased attend.