When her mother died three years ago, after a lengthy battle with kidney and heart problems, Leigh Ajan was comforted knowing that her mother's body, which she had willed to Tulane University, might one day help doctors find a cure for those diseases.

But her mother's body didn't stay at Tulane. It was sent instead to a body-brokerage company later accused of selling cadavers to the U.S. Army for use in land-mine tests. Ms. Ajan has no idea whether the remains were blown up in tests of protective boots, or, as the broker insists, shipped off to a medical school in Granada. Either way, she is angry.

"If my mother had known that her body could be sold like it was nothing, she never would have donated it," says the 22-year-old Louisiana woman, who has joined a class-action lawsuit against both Tulane and the brokerage company, National Anatomical Service.

Tulane has severed its ties to the Staten Island, N.Y.-based dealer and is scrambling to reassure pending and prospective donors as it reviews its willed-body program. But across the country, medical educators, including anatomy professors, are worried. Whether they teach the fundamentals of the human body to first-year medical students, test new surgical techniques, or do research on eye diseases using the corneas of donated cadavers, they rely on the trust and good will of thousands of donors.

That trust has been badly shaken by a series of incidents at medical schools in which body parts have been bought and sold with little oversight or respect for the donors' wishes. As the demand for cadavers has grown -- for anatomy classes, continuing-medical-education conferences, and biotech labs -- so has the potential to make big profits by transferring bodies among institutions. Selling bodies or body parts is illegal, but there is no limit to how much a middleman can charge to transport them.

A new breed of entrepreneur has emerged: the specialist in body parts who, taking advantage of lax regulations, has an unsettling amount of freedom to ship body parts around the country. While some of these middlemen are legitimate business people facilitating the exchange of bodies for research and education, others are unscrupulous profiteers cashing in on an illegal trade and placing body-donation programs in jeopardy.

"The perception that people are mishandling body parts is toxic to future gifts," says Arthur L. Caplan, a physician and the director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

"In Western culture, one of the worst things you can do to dishonor someone is to desecrate his body," he says. "If [the operators of willed-body programs] are seen as stealing bodies, or selling parts on the side or blowing them up without consent, many people are going to think twice about becoming donors."

Stolen Parts

The Tulane scandal is not an isolated incident. In March the University of California at Los Angeles suspended its willed-body program after two men -- one a UCLA employee, the other a businessman -- were arrested and charged with trafficking in stolen body parts (The Chronicle, March 19).

Henry G. Reid, director of the program, was charged with felony grand theft, and Ernest V. Nelson was charged with receiving stolen property. Investigators say Mr. Nelson bought hundreds of donated cadavers from Mr. Reid, cut them up, and resold the body parts to research companies. Neither of the men could be reached for comment.

The scandal caused an uproar in California, where donors' relatives have joined in a class-action lawsuit against UCLA. And it gave potential donors around the country another reason to feel squeamish.

It's not the first time UCLA has been entangled in such a mess. In 1996 the family of a man who had donated his body to UCLA sued the medical school, saying that over a 40-year period, nearly 18,000 bodies had been cremated along with laboratory animals and been dumped as trash. The lawsuit is still pending.

This time university officials say they are determined to clean up the program. George Deukmejian, former governor of California, heads a university task force that is reviewing the willed-body programs at the system's five medical schools. It will also develop guidelines to prevent future scandals, like the one that rocked the University of California at Irvine in 1999. The director of that program, Christopher Brown, was fired after officials learned that he was selling body parts on the side, and that his records were so shoddy that some donors' families had probably received the wrong remains. After that, Irvine tightened its procedures and record-keeping requirements.

Dr. Caplan, however, remains skeptical that the latest round of investigations will have a lasting effect. "We have had scandals in the past, and they haven't led to reform," he says. "Body donation exists in a gray zone. It doesn't have the drama of organ donation, with its coolers and jets and lives saved from the brink of death."

He worries that medical schools, faced with a diminishing supply of bodies and the threat of lawsuits, may switch from human cadavers to computer simulations -- as some schools already have. "Very few virtual-reality patients sue anyone," he says wryly. But while simulated corpses can be effective in some teaching, using them is not the same as practicing techniques on a real body.

"If medical students are learning to do a hip-replacement surgery," Dr. Caplan says, "you want them to practice on a cadaver before they do it on your grandmother."

'An Unregulated Mess'

Students at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston are still getting hands-on practice, but it's unlikely that they are cutting into the bodies of any local residents. The Texas medical school has been importing bodies from other schools since suspending its own willed-body program two years ago.

Meanwhile, the FBI has been investigating whether the program's former supervisor, Allen Tyler, illegally sold body parts for his own profit. Investigators say he made thousands of dollars from fingernails and toenails alone, selling them to a pharmaceutical company. Mr. Tyler, who died in January, may also have unwittingly sent diseased body parts to other research facilities around the country. And, in what the medical school's president, John D. Stobo, referred to as "an unforgivable failure of oversight," the ashes of some donors were apparently mixed together.

Ronald S. Wade, the director of anatomical services for the University of Maryland School of Medicine, says shoddy oversight is common in willed-body programs. "Many of these programs are run by a guy from a funeral home who operates without any checks and balances," he says. "People don't want to deal with death, so he's out of sight, out of mind."

The American Association of Anatomists is also calling for stricter regulations. "It is critical that those entrusted with responsibility for a Willed Body Program meet high standards related to the integrity, identity, and security of the bodies donated to their programs," read the statement from the group, which represents anatomy professors and researchers. "At a minimum, all programs should comply with the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, which prohibits the sale or purchase of human body parts." The standards recommended by the 1968 act have been adopted by all 50 states.

Robert S. McCuskey, a professor of anatomy at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, heads the association. "Most people believe they're donating for the purpose of educating medical students and residents, and more than 90 percent of the time that's honored," he says. "But every once in a while, one of these scandals occurs, and it reflects negatively on all of us."

Michael J. Meyer, a professor of philosophy at Santa Clara University who has written about ethical issues surrounding willed-body programs, says he'd like to see Congress set up a regulated, nonprofit system for transporting bodies.

"Right now we have an unregulated mess on our hands," he says.

Exploding Cadavers

Tulane officials found that out the hard way. The university receives about 150 cadavers a year but it needs only 40 to 45. The rest are distributed to other medical schools or research centers, often through body-brokerage companies.

But medical schools that turn cadavers over to those third-party brokers don't always know where the bodies will end up. They might be crushed in automobile crash tests or sliced up by surgeons attending a continuing-education conference at a fancy resort.

In Tulane's case, nine bodies that the university had sent to National Anatomical Service, a body-brokerage company, ended up being sold to the Army for $37,000, an Army spokesman said. The cadavers were blown up at a training base in Aberdeen, Md., in tests for footwear designed to protect soldiers who step on land mines.

Charles Dasey, a spokesman for the Army's Medical Research and Material Command, which conducted the tests, says that he understands why some donors might be upset, but that studies designed to reduce injuries and death in the military are a legitimate use of donated cadavers.

"Both military and civilian researchers, as well as academic medical researchers, treat the body with respect and dignity throughout the research process," he says.

The owner of the company insists that it only transported the bodies to the Army. John Vincent Scalia, who operates the business out of his funeral home, says he charges enough to cover the transportation and make a small profit, but declines to elaborate. "We've transported about 8,000 bodies between medical schools since 1976," he told The Chronicle. "Very few medical schools have willed-body programs, but every accredited medical school needs them to teach anatomy."

In fact, more than 35 states have at least one willed-body program -- most of them at medical schools -- but that leaves plenty of schools needing bodies transported across state lines.

Tulane officials decline to comment on the impact the scandal is likely to have on donations. In a statement, Mary Bitner Anderson, co-director of the university's willed-body program, says Tulane is "extremely grateful to the individuals and their families who make the unselfish decision to donate the bodies of loved ones to further medical knowledge."

She says the medical school has appointed a review committee "to ensure that all bodies that are willed to Tulane will be used in programs at academic medical institutions, consistent with the intentions of the donors." University officials have also said that they charge third parties only enough money to cover the cost of preserving the bodies, and that Tulane does not profit when excess cadavers are sent elsewhere.

Sidestepping a Scandal

Other medical schools aren't waiting for bad news to arise before overhauling their programs. Oregon Health & Science University has tightened its controls to be able to assure possible donors that their bodies will be treated with respect. Historically all bodies donated to the medical school remain in the state, and about 99 percent are used for education. The remaining 1 percent are used for research.

Families can reclaim the cremated remains at any time, and bodies are tagged and tracked by a database so that donors know which facilities are using the bodies and for what purpose.

"We've received a number of phone calls from people enrolled in our program who are concerned about the reports they're hearing from other parts of the country," says Karmen L. Schmidt, head of the school's body-donation program.

"They want to be sure that body parts aren't being farmed out to other companies, and that no one is profiting from them." So far, she says, "We've been able to quell their fears, and no one has pulled out."

Still, images of laboratory land mines and lost bodies are hard to erase. They are likely to haunt willed-body programs for years to come.