For nearly a decade, a most unusual commodity has arrived regularly at the Stanley Medical Research Institute in Bethesda: human brains, packed in dry ice and sent by FedEx from coroners across the country.
Removed from the skulls of the recently dead to preserve their value as objects of scientific research, the brains are catalogued, frozen and sliced into thin samples, which are then shipped to researchers around the globe seeking to unlock the mysteries of schizophrenia and other illnesses.
Even before establishing one of the nation's largest so-called brain banks at the nonprofit Stanley institute, psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey had built a name for himself in the psychiatric community for his theories about the origins of schizophrenia and methods of treatment for the mentally ill.
But nothing in Torrey's past as a researcher and an author prepared his admirers, or his critics, for the allegations contained in a growing number of lawsuits filed in Maine. The lawsuits, the most recent of which was filed June 17, allege that a contractor for SMRI obtained brains from cadavers in that state without receiving full consent from family members.
Some families who filed suits say the contractor told them that he would take only small samples of brain tissue but then took entire brains. At least one family says in a suit that SMRI did not have consent to take any tissue.
"I felt so violated," said Lorraine Gagnon, who claims that the brain of her late son, A.J. Gagnon, was taken without her permission. "I still have nightmares of my son calling me, saying, 'Mom, help.' Those don't go away."
A criminal probe by the Maine attorney general's office is underway, and a spokesman for that office confirmed that the U.S. attorney's office is also investigating the matter.
No one alleges that Torrey or SMRI profited financially from the arrangement. But if the allegations are true, SMRI's actions would violate the central tenets of organ donation, ethicists say.
"There's a general repulsion to the idea of people taking out organs without permission, and I don't think you have to have any formal training in ethics to understand that that's repellent," said Paul Lombardo, director of the Program in Law and Medicine at the University of Virginia's Center for Biomedical Ethics.
Through two attorneys -- one in Maine and one in Bethesda -- SMRI officials declined to comment on the specifics of the lawsuits. In court documents and correspondence with John Campbell, the Gagnons' attorney, SMRI officials have maintained that the institute and contract worker Matthew Cyr acted legally and ethically in obtaining consent.
"SMRI has never knowingly obtained any donation of brain or other tissue without the full consent of available next of kin," the institute said in a written statement.
Torrey did not respond to an e-mail request for an interview. A request to speak with him left with Thomas V. Laprade, a Portland, Maine, lawyer representing SMRI, also went unanswered. SMRI general counsel Lori Keenan declined to discuss the lawsuits, saying the institute's written statements constituted its response.
