Foreign
Desk
| May 13, 2003, Tuesday
Inquiry
Shows British Scientists Took Brains Without
Families' Consent
By SARAH LYALL (NYT) 983 words
Late Edition - Final , Section A ,
Page 8 , Column 1
ABSTRACT
- British government announces that as many
as 22,000 brains were removed, most without
relatives' permission, from people who died
from 1970 to 1999; says rationale was
research into sickness, into functions of
brain and into depression and mental
illness; hospital morticians were paid for
each brain they provided to researchers
eager to get hold of new brains for their
studies; removing organs and tissues from
bodies without relatives' consent was
explicity outlawed in 1999, after earlier
scandal; government's later investigation
was prompted by long campaign of Orthodox
Jewish woman incensed that treatment of her
husband's body violated family's religious
beliefs (M) Nothing about Cyril Isaacs's
death was easy, from the way he carried it
out -- hanging himself with the cord from an
electric kettle -- to the distress his
widow, Elaine, felt over the authorities'
insistence on performing an autopsy.
But that was not the end of it. Thirteen
years later, in 2000, Mrs. Isaacs's
inadvertent discovery that her husband's
brain had been removed and handed over to
researchers touched off a grim and
far-reaching investigation into the fate of
the brains of the dead.
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