"We have a policy of not making statements to the press," Keenan said. "We're just not at liberty to say more."
In an affidavit filed as part of a lawsuit alleging that SMRI took the brain of a Freedom, Maine, man without full familial consent, Torrey said: "In connection with my follow-up communications with donors' families, neither Matthew Cyr's professionalism nor the veracity of the consents he obtained was ever questioned."
Later in the affidavit, Torrey called the allegations of improper consent "false and hurtful and they defame both SMRI as an organization and me."
An attorney for Cyr, the contract worker for SMRI, did not return calls seeking comment. Cyr stopped working with SMRI in 2003, according to Torrey's affidavit. Torrey did not specify in the affidavit why Cyr stopped working for the institute. Cyr was employed part time by the Maine medical examiner's office during at least part of the time that he worked for SMRI, Torrey said in the affidavit.
The allegations have sent a shock wave through the national organ research and transplant community, already reeling from revelations of the alleged sale of human corpses in California and the alleged use of bodies for Army land mine tests without family consent in Louisiana.
In April, UCLA suspended its donated body program amid allegations that some of the bodies were sold. And last year, a donor's family sued Tulane University in New Orleans, alleging that the body was shipped to a middleman who sold at least seven bodies to the U.S. Army, which used them in land mine experiments.
Concerns are growing that the incidents will suppress an already stressed market for research organs.
Such high-profile cases put at risk recent gains in encouraging people to donate their organs, said Ronald Zielke, director of the Brain and Tissue Bank for Developmental Disorders at the University of Maryland.
"This is an extraordinarily delicate area. It's like walking on eggshells," Zielke said. "If there's a negative attitude that permeates the country regarding tissue donation, it will be a great disservice to everybody."
The controversy surrounding SMRI's brain bank began in 2003. After A.J. Gagnon died of a prescription drug overdose in his parents' home, his brain arrived at the institute's Bethesda laboratories. It was labeled with a case number -- S-538 -- and frozen and catalogued to await requests from researchers.
For SMRI, the transaction was routine. A phone call that June changed everything.
Lorraine Gagnon rang up an SMRI secretary, saying that the institute had wrongly indicated on correspondence with her that her son was schizophrenic.
