Two arrested in California body parts scandal

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Two California men were arrested on Wednesday in connection with a 2004 scandal over the sale of cadavers which had been donated to the University of California Los Angeles for medical research, prosecutors said.

Henry Reid, 57, the former director of UCLA's Willed Body Program, and Ernest Nelson, 49, the alleged middleman, were accused of conspiring to defraud the program of its donor bodies for personal financial gain.

They were also charged with other crimes ranging from theft to tax evasion.

The Los Angeles District Attorney's office said Reid, who resigned when the scandal broke in 2004, sold bodies from UCLA's program to Nelson and deposited thousands of dollars into his personal bank account.

Nelson made more than $1 million between 1999-2004 by selling the human cadavers and body parts supplied by Reid to more than 20 private medical, pharmaceutical and hospital research companies, prosecutors said in a statement.

The UCLA program was suspended in 2004 and reopened in late 2005 with new safeguards, including implanting cadavers with tiny glass transmitters that could be tracked by computer from the time the bodies are donated to the time they are disposed of.

The Willed Body Program accepted bodies from patients and their families who expected them to be used for scientific research or students training to be doctors.

But Nelson gave several interviews in 2004 in which he spoke of going to the body freezer at UCLA twice a week, with a saw, to disassemble bodies and collect various parts that he sold to corporate medical research companies.

Nelson said that over six years he bought parts from some 800 cadavers from Reid for more than $700,000.

Nelson and Reid are being held on $1 million bail each and are expected to be arraigned later this week.