SANTA ANA, Calif. - Donated human remains are processed into medical products that generate hundreds of millions of dollars for U.S. companies despite laws barring profit from body parts, The Orange County Register reported Sunday.
Grieving families are told that the donations are a gift of life, but the newspaper found material harvested from the dead helps pay six-figure salaries of tissue bank executives and fuels an industry that is expected to have $1 billion in revenues by 2003.
''I thought I was donating to a nonprofit. I didn't know I was lining someone's pocket,'' said Sandra Shadwick, whose brother's remains were given to a Los Angeles tissue bank. ''It makes me angry. It makes me appalled. If it's not illegal, it ought to be.''
The nonprofit tissue banks screen donors and mine body parts - for up to 100 patients from a single cadaver. The parts are then sold to the companies that make the products used by doctors and dentists, and the banks and businesses share revenues.
Sales pitches to survivors usually focus on vital organs, but most of the products derived from the dead are far from lifesaving: Cadaver skin is used to puff up the lips of models, enlarge penises and smooth out wrinkles.
The National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 banned profits from the sale of tissue, but companies and tissue banks are allowed to charge reasonable fees to handle and process the parts. The law does not define a reasonable charge.
''The law has never been tested in court. Nobody has ever decided what is selling and what isn't,'' said Jeanne Mowe, executive director of the American Association of Tissue Banks.
A single body can be harvested for material that is worth up to $34,000 for nonprofit tissue banks. The skin, tendons, heart valves, veins and corneas are then made available to doctors and hospitals for up to $110,000.
With bone taken from the same body, a cadaver can be worth $220,000.
''People who donate have no idea tissue is being processed into products that per gram or per ounce are in the price range of diamonds,'' said Arthur Caplan, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics.
Industry officials say donations would plummet if families knew their gifts generate profits. Another consequence would be a potential drop in the supply of vital organs such as hearts and livers, they say.
Lives are enhanced by donations: Tendons help athletes, cadaver skin helps solve bladder problems and corneas help the blind to see, said Michael Jeffries, chief financial officer for Osteotech Inc., a leader in the bone business.
''There is a profit,'' he said. ''It's not an evil thing because the profit is put to good use.''
The two largest for-profit tissue companies collected $142.3 million in sales last year and each pays its chief executive more than $460,000 annually, the newspaper said. The four largest nonprofit tissue banks will make $261 million in sales this year.
An analysis of the nation's 50 largest tissue banks found its executives earn an average of $135,000 year. One nonprofit in Los Angeles paid its chief $533,450 in 1998 and added a BMW as a perk, records show.
Thanks to government grants that help pay for advertisements, the number of organ and tissue donors increased 172 percent nationwide over the past five years, according to the American Association of Tissue Banks.
Last fall, Vice President Al Gore announced $5 million in grants to organ and tissue agencies.
''I did not know that the amount of money involved was as large as you have pointed out,'' Gore told the Register in a recent telephone interview.
Steve Oelrich, sheriff of Alachua County, Fla., says families do not want to know the details. He donated tissue from his son, who died in 1995.
''There are two things I don't want to know about this thing,'' he said. ''One is the financial part, that they sell this and the hospital buys that. And I don't want to visualize what they do to your child.''