High court allows brain harvesting lawsuit
SEATTLE – The family of a man whose brain was harvested for mental health research when he died can pursue a lawsuit against King County as well as the institute that received the organ, Washington’s high court ruled Thursday.
The state Supreme Court unanimously found that a lower court judge was wrong to dismiss all claims brought by the family of Jesse Smith, who died of heart problems in 2003 shortly after his 21st birthday.
Smith was an organ donor, and his mother, Nancy Adams, of Snoqualmie, said she and her husband consented by phone to providing brain tissue to the nonprofit Stanley Medical Research Institute of Maryland. Instead of taking a small tissue sample, however, the King County medical examiner’s office provided the entire brain.
“This was devastating to her to find this out,” said Adams’ lawyer, Steve Bulzomi. “It was hard enough to lose her son. To find out she was deceived on the worst day of her life, it was very, very difficult for her.”
Stanley Research, with an endowment of more than $300 million, created its brain bank in 1995 and calls itself the world’s biggest private source of philanthropic support for psychiatric research. It said in a statement issued last year that to its knowledge it has never obtained brains without full consent from next-of-kin.
But several families have disputed that. More than a dozen families in Maine have said they did not give consent for entire brains to be harvested, and a North Carolina woman also sued the King County medical examiner’s office, saying no such consent was given when her brother, Bradley Gierlich, died of a drug overdose in 1998. The Gierlich case is pending before the Washington Supreme Court.
Thursday’s ruling clears the way for a trial in King County Superior Court on whether Adams consented only to the donation of a small tissue sample, as she contends. Bulzomi said she intends to seek damages for emotional distress.
Smith had no history of mental health problems. The institute uses such brains as controls.
The institute says it is necessary to have whole brains because there is a dearth of knowledge about where in the brain abnormalities associated with psychological problems are located.