Panel to Study Problems at Medical School

UC Irvine on Tuesday selected 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, although no one has been charged in a criminal investigation by the district attorney’s office. UC Irvine officials said that despite a four-month review, four cadavers in the morgue remain unidentified because of incomplete or inadequate record-keeping.

UC Irvine Chancellor Ralph Cicerone said the committee will act independently during its inquiry, set its own schedule and be free to 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 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 more recently the departure last year of a highly regarded professor who engaged in unauthorized cancer experiments on people. The medical center was also forced this year to give refunds after it improperly billed dying patients or Medicare more than $55,000 for experimental drug treatments.