• printer friendly
• mail this article
• iPod format
• digg

Photo

Henry Reid, director of the UCLA Willed Body Program, was taken into custody by UCPD on March 6th

Photo

Dr. Jorge Lazereff, right, and Dr. Henry Kawamoto were two lead surgeons who operated on the Guat

In recent weeks, UCLA has been getting a lot of coverage in the international press, but not the kind of publicity the school desires.

The story of two UCLA medical center employees arrested in connection with the illegal sale of cadavers donated to the UCLA Willed Body Program has been covered by everyone from CNN and Reuters to Yahoo! Asia News.

It has received coverage around the world, which should come as no surprise, says Steve Rendall, senior analyst at Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, a national media watch group.

“This story seems morbid and has a sense of grim, compelling gossip to it. Not to diminish it, but it has a lot of tabloid potential,” Rendall said.

For the most part, university and college-oriented stories do not receive much play in the international press. The Willed Body Program at UCLA, however, has something most university news stories do not: a hint of a scandal.

“I don’t know the last time I saw anything about a university being covered heavily, unless it is some sort of a morbid campus story,” Rendall said.

The Willed Body Program at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine manages cadavers donated to the school for educational purposes.

The program received massive media coverage earlier this month when police arrested two men accused of selling parts of donated cadavers for profit. Henry Reid, one of the two arrested, is the director of the program.

In recent years the only UCLA-related story that has come close to the amount of international coverage received by the Willed Body Program was the successful separation of conjoined Guatemalan twins, performed at the medical center in August 2002.

The nearly 22-hour separation surgery of Maria Teresa and her sister, Maria de Jesus, was successfully completed, and the twins’ recovery created a media blitz all over the globe.

Their story has been covered by such media giants as the BBC and CNBC, while also getting press in other country’s newspapers, such as “The Tribune” in India.

Rendall said the two stories, both of which involved the medical center, are of interest for different reasons.

“The conjoined twins story is driven by a much more human interest angle. The sale of cadavers is much more gossip material,” Rendall said.

It is also true that the Willed Body Program story has been receiving diminished coverage as time goes on, though the twins were still big news months after the surgery.

“You got to watch a human drama unfold,” Rendall said, referring to the twins’ recovery.

While continuing press on the twins story was highly beneficial for UCLA, the coverage of the Willed Body Program is not.

“Any bad publicity about the use of willed bodies potentially discourages prospective donors,” said Thomas Moore, president of the American Association of International Medical Graduates, a nonprofit information source for U.S. citizens applying to international schools.

In the wake of the scandal, some newspaper articles speculated that the negative coverage by the foreign press might detract from the willingness of international students to attend UCLA.

But April Morrow, admissions coordinator at the American Association of Medical Colleges, a nonprofit organization that advocates for reform in medical education, said international students looking into medical schools in the United States would not be too influenced by the recent events.

Robin Williamson, a communications professor at Saint Thomas University in Houston, also said international students will not be impacted by the recent stories.

“The way it has been covered internationally is more of a dismissive gesture than an actual criticism of the school. ‘Here are the Americans again being sloppy,’ that sort of thing,” Williamson said.

She added that UCLA should be worried more about national press coverage, since that is where most of the criticism comes from.

“I think with stories like these, much will depend on the slant of the story and how many more stories of that type are out there right now,” Williamson said, referring to stories dealing with the Willed Body Program.

“The more we see of a story, the more we think it’s important and agenda-setting.”