Panel to Probe UCI Is Named

UC Irvine on Tuesday tapped a group of nationally renowned scientists and doctors to determine if deep-rooted shortcomings contributed to a string of problems at its College of Medicine.

The nine-member external review panel will begin its work next month with a two-day visit to the campus. Its members are to pursue a wide-ranging inquiry into management problems at the school in Irvine and its medical center in Orange.

Those problems most recently resulted in accusations that bodies donated to the medical school were used for private gain. The director was fired, though no one has been charged in a criminal investigation by the district attorney’s office. UCI officials said that despite a four-month review, four cadavers in the morgue remain unidentified because of incomplete or inadequate record keeping by the school’s Willed Body Program.

In announcing the panel, UCI Chancellor Ralph Cicerone said the committee will act independently during its inquiry, set its own schedule and be free to do and make whatever recommendations it finds are needed.

“We are honestly looking for good advice,” he said. “We don’t think they will come up with the magic bullet . . . but they will provide fresh observations of anything that we are missing.”

The announcement comes nearly eight weeks after Cicerone and medical school Dean Thomas C. Cesario sent two stern letters to the campus announcing a half-dozen moves to tighten management and strengthen oversight at the medical school.

The school has been hit with several scandals this decade, beginning with the theft in the early 1990s of eggs from patients being treated at its world-famous fertility clinic and including more recently the departure last year of a highly regarded professor who engaged in unauthorized cancer experiments on people. In addition, the medical center this year was forced to give refunds after it improperly billed dying patients or Medicare more than $55,000 for experimental drug treatments.

Cesario described the problems of the school as akin to growing pains, in part inflicted by the difficulty with converting a county hospital into a major university medical center.

“We are a medical center in evolution and trying to reach maturity,” he said.

The review panel is chaired by Dr. David Kipnis, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. He is a Distinguished University Professor of Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis’ School of Medicine, who also served as chairman of the department of medicine for 20 years.

The panel includes former Orange County Supervisor Marian Bergeson, as well as two physicians who, like Kipnis, are members of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine: Dr. Ralph Snyderman is dean of the Duke University medical school and head of its medical center; Dr. Helen M. Ranney is professor emeritus and former chairwoman of the department of medicine at UC San Diego.

The panel drew unqualified praise from Dr. Gerald Levey, dean of UCLA’s school of medicine and provost of medical sciences. He described Kipnis as “one of the truly great physician scientists of the last part of the 20th century.”

“I think they are fabulous people,” he said. “With an experienced group like this, they can dissect anything.”

Cicerone and Cesario acknowledged that no ethicists had been named to the group despite a commitment to include one when the panel was announced in September. Kipnis told Cicerone that the panel would discuss the issue, and decide whether the group needs to add an ethicist or just to consult, or needs one at all.

“I leave that up to them,” said Cicerone.

The panel members will not be paid for their work but will receive reimbursement for expenses.

School officials also announced that they would likely select a new director of the Willed Body Program before the end of December. Interviews with candidates were conducted Tuesday, said Associate Dean Dr. Peter Lawrence. The position has been upgraded from one that paid $33,000 to $40,000.

Officials also acknowledged that they have been unable to identify all of the cadavers being used in its program. After testing for possible infectious diseases, a decision to destroy all 26 cadavers in the morgue was reversed, and they are being used to train medical school students.

Fingerprinting of the cadavers did not aid in the identification, said officials, because the fingertips had insufficient identifying characteristics.

The university in the past month did identify one cadaver using information provided by UC San Diego, which had donated some bodies to the UCI program. UCI also has contacted all the families who expressed an interest in knowing the disposition of their relatives’ remains and checked identifying features against the unknown corpses. None matched, said Lawrence.

University officials refused to say that the four might never be identified.

“It is our hope that people will come forward and give us information that allows is to make that identification,” he said. “It is possible we will get further information.”