A Suffolk woman's lawsuit over the removal of her deceased husband's
brain is among a growing number of legal actions nationwide that raise
ethical and legal questions about how scientists acquire body parts for
research. Newsday.com writes:
In Manhattan, Mount Sinai Medical Center - named as a defendant in the Suffolk case - maintains a brain bank that has obtained at least 675 specimens from the brains of patients who died at Pilgrim Psychiatric Center in Brentwood.... Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics, served as an expert witness in some of the Maine cases. He said that the issue of what constitutes consent is sometimes poorly defined in the law. "No state, including New York, is particularly aggressive in giving oversight to tissue collection," Caplan said.
