List May Grow in UC Irvine Scandal : Medicine: Lawyer finds misplaced papers indicating wider problems involving the alleged theft of eggs and embryos at fertility clinic.

UC Irvine officials said Wednesday that, to their surprise, a UC-hired attorney has had a stack of documents in his possession since early October indicating that the scope of the UC Irvine fertility scandal may be far greater than estimated.

“This is very embarrassing,” Irvine Chancellor Laurel L. Wilkening said late Wednesday. “This is about as embarrassing an event as one could have.”

The admission comes just days after UC Irvine officials insisted that they had vigorously pursued all information leading to identification of possible victims in the nationally publicized scandal, in which three university doctors at two Orange County clinics are accused of stealing the eggs and embryos of women and giving them to other patients.

This weekend, UC Irvine officials denied that they had access to any evidence suggesting that the fiasco had involved more than 35 women, the estimate officials had made last summer. And they steadfastly insisted they had no access to a list of patients--circulated publicly in recent weeks--indicating that the scandal involved at least 60.

The list, prepared by a UC Irvine fertility clinic embryologist, is in the hands of the U.S. attorney’s office and other criminal investigators, but university officials said it had not been given to them.

While trying to locate the list this week, however, an outside attorney hired by the UC general counsel’s office discovered a “two-inch-thick” stack of documents in his possession that probably contains the names of more victims, Wilkening said. The attorney, Byron Beam of Santa Ana, notified UC officials of his mistake in a Nov. 7 letter released by the university.

“To my horror and chagrin . . . I found several handwritten pages of what now appears to be lists of patients who had eggs donated to them outside the paid donor program,” Beam wrote.

“Now, because of our failure to promptly review, analyze and advise you of the . . . materials, we have put the chancellor and the chancellor’s office in an embarrassing position through no fault of theirs,” Beam wrote.

Beam acknowledged he had told the university late last week that he knew nothing of a “purported list of donors and recipients.” He said he and his firm took “full responsibility for the mistake.”

Wilkening said there is certainly some “overlap” between the list of 150 patients discovered by Beam and a roster of about 200 donors and recipients circulating among patients and their attorneys, but she could not say whether the lists are the same.

The chancellor, who described herself as “dismayed, frustrated and angry” at the attorney’s blunder, said she has turned over all of the documents, including 350 pages of embryologists’ logs, to a UC-appointed panel of physicians for immediate investigation.

The three-member panel is the same group that probed the first reports of wrongdoing by the clinics’ doctors this spring and found “credible evidence” of as many as five unapproved transfers.

The revelation is a major setback for UC Irvine, coming just as news of the scandal had slowed to a trickle and after the chancellor said the institution appeared to be headed for better times. Just last month, the university received a major boost when two of its scientists won Nobel prizes.

Some longtime critics of the university’s handling of the crisis said Wednesday that the most recent development, coming after months of embarrassing revelations, is unacceptable.

“There’s no more vital information” than the number of affected patients, said state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), whose Higher Education Committee held hearings on the scandal in July.

“To believe this story--that it was an oversight by the counsel--is difficult enough,” he said. “You can either believe a cover-up or incompetence as an answer.”