Organs Body Parts

A 1966 World Championships gold medal in the women's downhill may be retroactively awarded to former French skier Marielle Goitschel because the winner turned out to be a man, a skiing official said Friday. Erika Schinegger of Austria, who won the gold medal at Portillo, Chile, discovered during medical tests later in her career that she was in fact a man, according to a new autobiography.

People who live in New Jersey can be forgiven if they initially yawned Thursday morning at the news of another federal sting that swept up a wide range of public officials, including the young mayor of Hoboken, who's been on the job all of three weeks. They might have even shrugged at the report that five rabbis were also snared in the dragnet for allegedly washing $3 million through an international money-laundering ring. But body parts?

When the Marines opened the ancient freezer in the abandoned building Wednesday, they found ... body parts. The squeamish need go no further. The macabre tale began Wednesday morning on the grounds of the Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center, the noted county hospital in Downey, where a group of U.S. Marines were using abandoned buildings as part of a military exercise. The troops spotted a freezer inside one of the buildings.

Israeli police have broken up an organ-transplant ring that persuaded dozens of Israelis to have a kidney removed in Ukraine in exchange for $30,000 each. Nine Israelis suspected of organ and human trafficking are in custody, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said. The case was opened when an Israeli woman filed a police complaint charging that she was not paid after her kidney was removed in Ukraine, Rosenfeld said.

In a major advance toward the development of artificial organs, bladders grown from patients' own cells in the laboratory have been successfully implanted in seven children with spina bifida and shown to function for five years or longer, researchers reported today. The achievement, reported online in the international medical journal the Lancet, marks the first time that artificial organs more complicated than skin and bone have been implanted in humans.

Gen. Alvaro Obregon's right arm, severed in battle in 1915, stored in his doctor's safe for 20 years and displayed in a marble monument for another half a century, today is the centerpiece of a modern Mexican controversy. Although preserved in a jar of formaldehyde, the former President of Mexico's legendary arm has disintegrated over the decades to little more than a wrist and hand. The remains are undignified, say friends and family members, and should be destroyed.

. Using cells from sheep's amniotic fluid, researchers have constructed tracheas for fetal lambs that can be used to repair congenitally malformed ones. The Children's Hospital Boston team reported Thursday at an American Academy of Pediatrics meeting that they collected mesenchymal stem cells, grew them in culture, then seeded them onto a tube-shaped scaffolding. Prenatal lambs receiving the tracheas were able to breathe normally at birth. Researchers hope to begin tests in humans soon.

Two years ago, in a case that garnered international attention, Ernest V. Nelson was arrested and accused of being a middleman in a scheme to sell body parts from corpses donated to UCLA's medical school. Now, Nelson, who has not been charged with a crime, is seeking to clear his name: writing his memoirs, helping lawyers suing the school and filing his own suit against University of California regents and the police officers who arrested him.

A jar containing what appears to be part of a human brain was discovered in the bed of a truck abandoned in Huntington Beach, police said Wednesday. The blue 1962 Dodge pickup was found behind a motel on Yorktown Avenue on Jan. 14 and had been at a private impound lot ever since, police said. The brain, sealed in a half-gallon glass jar of murky liquid, apparently had been there undisturbed until the truck was cleaned out Wednesday to be put up for auction.

Paraguayan police rescued seven Brazilian baby boys from a gang of kidnapers planning to kill them in the United States and sell their vital organs there, Juvenile Court Judge Angel Campos said in Asuncion. The babies--aged between 3 and 6 months--were rescued Wednesday from a private home in an Asuncion suburb. The infants were scheduled to be sold in the United States for about $15,000 each, police said. Seven people, including five Brazilian women, were arrested.

When the Marines opened the ancient freezer in the abandoned building Wednesday, they found ... body parts. The squeamish need go no further. The macabre tale began Wednesday morning on the grounds of the Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center, the noted county hospital in Downey, where a group of U.S. Marines were using abandoned buildings as part of a military exercise. The troops spotted a freezer inside one of the buildings.

Cadavers and their organs have been in great demand since the early 1800s, when anatomy courses first became a regular part of medical school curricula. Medical students rely on the bodies and parts to learn anatomy, doctors depend on them to perfect new procedures and surgeons count on them for transplants. But before the modern era of donor programs, procuring bodies for science was a challenge -- one that was often met by criminals.

Thousands of genes behave differently in the same organs of males and females, researchers reported Friday, a finding that may help explain why men and women have different responses to drugs and diseases. Their study of brain, liver, fat and muscle tissue from mice showed that the level of activity of a gene varied according to sex. The same is almost certainly true of humans, the team at UCLA reported in the August issue of Genome Research.

In a major advance toward the development of artificial organs, bladders grown from patients' own cells in the laboratory have been successfully implanted in seven children with spina bifida and shown to function for five years or longer, researchers reported today. The achievement, reported online in the international medical journal the Lancet, marks the first time that artificial organs more complicated than skin and bone have been implanted in humans.

Two years ago, in a case that garnered international attention, Ernest V. Nelson was arrested and accused of being a middleman in a scheme to sell body parts from corpses donated to UCLA's medical school. Now, Nelson, who has not been charged with a crime, is seeking to clear his name: writing his memoirs, helping lawyers suing the school and filing his own suit against University of California regents and the police officers who arrested him.

. Using cells from sheep's amniotic fluid, researchers have constructed tracheas for fetal lambs that can be used to repair congenitally malformed ones. The Children's Hospital Boston team reported Thursday at an American Academy of Pediatrics meeting that they collected mesenchymal stem cells, grew them in culture, then seeded them onto a tube-shaped scaffolding. Prenatal lambs receiving the tracheas were able to breathe normally at birth. Researchers hope to begin tests in humans soon.

A Riverside couple whose dream of owning a home was shattered when they found bags of formaldehyde-preserved human organs in the back yard filed a lawsuit against the home's previous owners, their real estate agent and several government agencies.

A severed foot found at a Topanga Canyon landfill site apparently belonged to a man who committed suicide by jumping off a freeway bridge 45 miles away, authorities said Tuesday. A 30-year-old Paramount man jumped from an overpass of the 91 Freeway onto the 605 Freeway in Cerritos on Saturday, said Lt. Larry Dietz of the Los Angeles County coroner's office. The coroner's report said the man was struck by at least one vehicle and suffered massive injuries.

One of the leading children's hospitals in Britain illegally harvested hearts, brains, eyes and other organs from thousands of dead children without the consent of their parents, according to a government report published Tuesday. The report blamed a rogue pathologist at Alder Hey children's hospital in Liverpool for systematically removing "every organ from every child who had a post-mortem" between 1988 and 1995.