Much of the storm at UCLA has focused on the fact that donors’ families thought their bodies were going to be used for training doctors and medical students, something people regard as a public service, when, in fact, according to the Los Angeles Times, they were being sold for profit to companies that would use them for experimentation.

“We will soon see that there will be admissions [of body and tissue selling] coming from all over,” said Michele Goodwin, Director of the Health Law Institute at De Paul University College of Law. "There are a number of companies that trade on the New York Stock Exchange that engage in this: they provide knees, they provide spleens," and other tissues used for surgeries or medical research -- for a profit.

"We need only ask 'where are these body parts coming from?'" Goodwin said. Since it is against federal law to sell human organs or tissues, and people are unlikely to be donating their remains to private companies, “clearly they’re getting them in an underground fashion,” through bodies that were initially donated for medical teaching.

Dr. Jon Lomasney, a professor at Northwestern University and head of its autopsy service, has a different analysis.

“Is there really a black market?” he asked. Some companies, he explained, do need human tissues for drug testing, or to extract DNA or RNA for research.

“There are a lot of companies trying to develop new therapies for human disease,” he explaned. “The need for that is quite great, [because] no one is going to will their body to Genentech.”

But, he said, there are plenty of legitimate ways for those corporations to conduct research.

According to Lomasney, “the way they should do it is to collaborate with an investigator at a medical school.” While arrangements could be made to preserve patent rights for corporations, he said, Northwestern, at least, always reserves the right to publish the results of their research, assuring that some part of the work remains publicly available.

The nine medical schools in Illinois that accept donated bodies for teaching all work through a jointly-run organization called the Anatomical Gift Association, explained Larry Cochard, president of the AGA’s board of directors, and director of anatomy labs at Northwestern University.

Body donation, in which an entire cadaver is provided to allow medical students to study human anatomy and surgical procedures firsthand, should not be confused with organ donation for transplant, experts said, though the same body can often be eligible for both.

“It would be very difficult for something like [what happened at UCLA] to happen here,” Cochard said. For one thing, he said, while the UCLA willed-body program was administered through the medical school, the AGA is a separate, nonprofit organization, with separate finances, which makes its financial dealings more transparent.

“The sole source of income for AGA is money from each school for the cadavers that they use,” he said. While it is illegal to purchase bodies or body parts, organizations that handle donated bodies may be paid to cover their expenses.

Cochard said because the AGA served nine schools across the state, the supply of bodies was barely enough to meet the demand of those schools' medical education programs. Any discrepancies in accounting for the bodies, he said, would quickly be noticed by the member schools.

AGA representatives said all bodies donated through AGA are cremated after they are used, and the cremains are returned to families who have requested them, or are locally interred.

Organ donation, by contrast, occurs in the hospital just after death is pronounced, and afterwards bodies are sent to the hospital morgue where normal funeral arrangements are made, said Kim McCullough, spokeswoman for Gift of Hope Organ and Tissue Donor Network, which handles organ donations in Illinois and northwest Indiana.

The only Illinois medical school that runs its own body donation program is Southern Illinois University, said SIU spokeswoman Rhonda Seeber.

“The only reason they’re donating directly to us is that we’re the only institution outside the Cook County area,” she said; it makes little sense for a body from southern Illinois to be shipped up to Chicago and then back to SIU. The school, she added, has a mortuary science program as well as a medical program, so the bodies donated there become teaching tools for two sets of students.

McCullough, at Gift of Hope, said her organization asks families whether, if organs or tissues are found to be ineligible for transplant, they can be re-donated for medical research.

“There are a lot of strong beliefs and customs that are ingrained in society about our remains,” Lomasney said. “I think it’s appropriate that we have those strong beliefs. It’s upon us as physicians and medical educators to respect those beliefs.”