You're reading: Ukraine at center of gruesome trade in human corpses

Editor’s Note: The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists is an independent global network of reporters who collaborate on cross-borders investigative stories. To see video, graphics and more stories in this series, go to www.icij.com/tissue. This story was co-reported by National Public Radio (USA).

On Feb. 24, Ukrainian authorities made an
alarming discovery: bones and other human tissues crammed into coolers in a
grimy white minibus.

Investigators grew even more intrigued when
they found, amid the body parts, envelopes stuffed with cash and autopsy
results written in English.

What the Security Service had disrupted was not
the work of a serial killer but part of an international pipeline of ingredients
for medical and dental products that are routinely implanted into people around
the world.

The seized documents suggested that the remains
of dead Ukrainians were destined for a factory in Germany belonging to the
subsidiary of a U.S. medical products company, Florida-based RTI Biologics.

RTI is one of a growing industry of companies
that make profits by turning mortal remains into everything from dental
implants to bladder slings to wrinkle cures.

The industry has flourished even as its
practices have roused concerns about how tissues are obtained and how well
grieving families and transplant patients are informed about the realities and
risks of the business.

In the U.S. alone, the biggest market and the
biggest supplier, an estimated two million products derived from human tissue
are sold each year, a figure that has doubled over the past decade.

It is an industry that promotes treatments and
products that literally allow the blind to see (through cornea transplants) and
the lame to walk (by recycling tendons and ligaments for use in knee
repairs).  It’s also an industry fueled
by powerful appetites for bottom-line profits and fresh human bodies.

In Ukraine, for example, the security service
believes that bodies passing through a morgue in the Mykolaiv oblast, the
gritty shipbuilding region located near the Black Sea, may have been feeding
the trade, leaving behind what investigators described as potentially dozens of
“human sock puppets” — corpses stripped of their reusable parts.

Industry officials argue that such alleged
abuses are rare, and that the industry operates safely and responsibly.

For its part, RTI didn’t respond to repeated
requests for comment or to a detailed list of questions provided a month before
this publication.

In public statements the company says it
“honors the gift of tissue donation by treating the tissue with respect, by
finding new ways to use the tissue to help patients and by helping as many
patients as possible from each donation.”

‘Our misfortune’

Despite its growth, the tissue trade has
largely escaped public scrutiny. This is thanks in part to less-than-aggressive
official oversight — and to popular appeal for the idea of allowing the dead to
help the living survive and thrive.

An eight-month, 11-country investigation by the
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has found,
however, that the tissue industry’s good intentions sometimes are in conflict
with the rush to make money from the dead.

Inadequate safeguards are in place to ensure
all tissue used by the industry is obtained legally and ethically, ICIJ
discovered from hundreds of interviews and thousands of pages of public
documents obtained through records requests in six countries.

Despite concerns by doctors that the lightly
regulated trade could allow diseased tissues to infect transplant recipients
with hepatitis, HIV and other pathogens, authorities have done little to deal
with the risks.

In contrast to tightly-monitored systems for
tracking intact organs such as hearts and lungs, authorities in the U.S. and
many other countries have no way to accurately trace where recycled skin and
other tissues come from and where they go.

At the same time, critics say, the
tissue-donation system can deepen the pain of grieving families, keeping them
in the dark or misleading them about what will happen to the bodies of their
loved ones.

Those
left behind, like the parents of 19-year-old Ukrainian Serhiy Malysh, who
committed suicide in 2008, are left to cope with a grim reality.

At Serhiy’s funeral, his parents discovered
deep cuts on his wrists. Yet they knew he had hanged himself.

They later learned that his body parts had been
recycled and shipped off as “anatomical material.”

“They make money with our misfortune,” Serhiy’s
father said.

Serhiy Malysh committed suicide in 2008. His tissues were allegedly recovered at the Kryvyj Rih morgue.

Awkward silence

During the transformational journey tissue
undergoes — from dead human to medical device — some patients don’t even know
that they are the final destination.

Doctors don’t always tell them that the products
used in their breast reconstructions, penis implants and other procedures were
reclaimed from the recently departed.

Nor are authorities always aware of where
tissues come from or where they go.

The lack of proper tracking means that by the
time problems are discovered some of the manufactured goods can’t be found.
When the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention assists in the recall of products
made from potentially tainted tissues, transplant doctors frequently aren’t
much help.

“Oftentimes there’s an awkward silence. They
say: ‘We don’t know where it went,’” said Dr. Matthew Kuehnert, the CDC’s
director of blood and biologics.

“We have barcodes for our [breakfast] cereals,
but we don’t have barcodes for our human tissues,” Kuehnert said.
“Every patient who has tissue implanted should know. It’s so obvious. It
should be a basic patient right. It is not. That’s ridiculous.”

Since 2002 the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) has documented at least 1,352 infections in the U.S. that
followed human tissue transplants, according to an ICIJ analysis of FDA data.
These infections were linked to the deaths of 40 people, the data shows.

One of the weaknesses of the tissue-monitoring
system is the secrecy and complexity that comes with the cross-border exchange
of body parts.

The Ukrainians export cadaver parts to the
Germans; the Germans export finished products to South Korea and the U.S.; the
South Koreans to Mexico; the U.S. to more than 30 countries. 271 active
FDA registered banks recover traditional tissues. Of those, 28 are foreign; and of
those, 20 are in Ukraine.

Distributors of manufactured products can be
found in the European Union, China, Canada, Thailand, India, South Africa,
Brazil, Australia and New Zealand. Some are subsidiaries of multinational
medical corporations.

The international nature of the industry,
critics claim, makes it easy to move products from place to place without much
scrutiny.

“If I buy something from Rwanda, then put a
Belgian label on it, I can import it into the U.S. When you enter into the
official system, everyone is so trusting,” said Dr. Martin Zizi, professor of neurophysiology at the Free University of Brussels.

Once a product is in the European Union, it can
be shipped to the U.S. with few questions asked.

“They assume you’ve done the quality
check,” Zizi said. “We are more careful with fruit and vegetables
than with body parts.”

Piece of the action

Inside the marketplace for human tissue, the
opportunities for profits are immense. A single, disease-free body can spin off
cash flows of $80,000 to $200,000 for the various non-profit and for-profit
players involved in recovering tissues and using them to manufacture medical
and dental products, according to documents and experts in the field.

It’s illegal in the U.S., as in most other countries, to buy or sell
human tissue. However, it’s permissible to pay service fees that ostensibly
cover the costs of finding, storing and processing human tissues.

Almost everyone gets a piece of the action.

Ground-level body wranglers in the U.S. can get
as much as $10,000 for each corpse they secure through their contacts at
hospitals, mortuaries and morgues. Funeral homes can act as middlemen to
identify potential donors. Public hospitals can get paid for the use of
tissue-recovery rooms.

And medical products multinationals like RTI?
They do well, too. Last year RTI earned $11.6 million in pretax profits on revenues of
$169 million.

Phillip Guyett, who ran a tissue recovery business in several U.S. states before he was convicted
of falsifying death records, said executives with companies that bought tissues
from him treated him to $400 meals and swanky hotel stays. They promised: “We
can make you a rich man.” It got to the point, he said, that he began looking at
the dead “with dollar signs attached to their parts.” Guyett never worked
directly for RTI.

Smoked salmon

Human skin takes on the color of smoked salmon
when it is professionally removed in rectangular shapes from a cadaver.  A good yield is about six square feet.

After being mashed up to remove moisture, some
is destined to protect burn victims from life-threatening bacterial infections
or, once further refined, for breast reconstructions after cancer.

The use of human tissue “has really
revolutionized what we can do in breast reconstruction surgery,” explains Dr. Ron Israeli, a plastic surgeon in Great Neck, N.Y.

“Since we started using it in about 2005, it’s
really become a standard technique.”

A significant number of recovered tissues are
transformed into products whose shelf names give little clue to their actual
origin.

They are used in the dental and beauty
industries, for everything from plumping up lips to smoothing out wrinkles.

Cadaver bone — harvested from the dead and
replaced with PVC piping for burial — is sculpted like pieces of hardwood into
screws and anchors for dozens of orthopedic and dental applications.

Human skin in use at Queen Astrid Military Hospital in Brussels

Or the bone is ground down and mixed with
chemicals to form strong surgical glues that are advertised as being better
than the artificial variety.

“At the basic level what we are doing to the
body, it’s a very physical — and I imagine some would say a very grotesque —
thing,” said Chris Truitt, a former RTI employee in Wisconsin.

“We are pulling out arm bones. We are pulling
out leg bones. We are cutting the chest open to pull the heart out to get at
the valves. We are pulling veins out from the inside of skin.”

Whole tendons, scrubbed cleaned and rendered
safe for transplant, are used to return injured athletes to the field of play.

There’s also a brisk trade in corneas, both
within countries and internationally.

Because of the ban on selling the tissue
itself, the U.S. companies that first commercialized the trade adopted the same
methods as the blood collection business.

The for-profit companies set up non-profit
offshoots to collect the tissue — in much the same way the Red Cross collects
blood that’s later turned into products by commercial entities.

Nobody charges for the tissue itself, which
under normal circumstances is freely donated by the dead (via donor registries)
or by their families.

Rather, tissue banks and other organizations
involved in the process receive ill-defined “reasonable payments” to compensate
them for obtaining and handling the tissue.

“The common lingo is to talk about procurement
from donors as ‘harvesting,’ and the subsequent transfers via the bone bank as
‘buying’ and ‘selling,’ ” wrote Klaus Høyer, from the University of
Copenhagen’s Department of Public Health, who talked to industry officials, donors and recipients for an
article published in the journal BioSocieties.

“These expressions were used freely in
interviews; however, I did not hear this terminology used in front of
patients.”

A U.S.-government funded study of the families
of U.S. tissue donors, published in 2010, indicates many may not understand the
role that for-profit companies play in the tissue donation system.

Seventy-three percent of families who took part
in the study said it was “not acceptable for donated tissue
to be bought and sold, for any purpose.”

Few protections

There is an inherent risk in transplanting
human tissues. Among other things, it has led to life-threatening bacterial
infections, and the spread of HIV, Hepatitis C and rabies in tissue recipients,
according to the CDC.

Modern blood and organ collection is bar-coded
and strongly regulated — reforms prompted by high-profile disasters that had
been caused by the poor screening of donors. Products made from skin and other
tissues, however, have few specific laws of their own.

In the U.S., the agency that regulates the
industry is the Food and Drug Administration, the same agency that’s charged
with protecting the nation’s food supply, medicines and cosmetics.

The FDA, which declined repeated requests for
on-record interviews, has no authority over health care facilities that implant
the material. And the agency doesn’t specifically track infections.

It does keep track of registered tissue banks,
and sometimes conducts an inspection. It also has the power to shut them down.

The FDA largely relies on standards that are
set by an industry body, the American Association of Tissue Banks (AATB). The association refused
repeated requests over four months for on-record interviews. It told ICIJ
during a background interview last week that the “vast majority” of
banks recovering traditional tissues such as skin and bone are accredited by
the AATB. Yet an analysis of AATB accredited banks and FDA registration data
shows about one third of tissue banks that recover traditional tissues such as
skin and bone are accredited by the AATB.

The association says the chance of
contamination in patients is low. Most products, the AATB says, undergo
radiation and sterilization, rendering them safer than, say, organs that are
transplanted into another human.

“Tissue is safe. It’s incredibly
safe,” an AATB executive said.

There is little data, though, to back up the
industry’s claims.

Unlike with other biologics regulated by the
FDA, agency officials explain, firms that make medical products out of human
tissues are required to report only the most serious adverse events they
discover. That means that if problems do arise, there’s no guarantee that
authorities are told.

And because doctors aren’t required to tell
patients they’re getting tissue from a cadaver, many patients may not associate
any later infection with the transplant.

On this point, the industry says it is able to
track the products from the donors to the doctors, using their own coding
systems, and that many hospitals have systems in place to track the tissues
after they’re implanted.

But no centralized regional or global system
assures products can be followed from donor to patient.

“Probably very few people get infected, but we
really don’t know because we don’t have surveillance and we don’t have a system
for detecting adverse events,” the CDC’s Kuehnert said.

The FDA recalled more than 60,000 tissue-derived products
between 1994 and mid-2007.

The most famous recall came in 2005. It
involved a company called Biomedical Tissue Services, which was run by a former dental
surgeon, Michael Mastromarino.

Mastromarino got many of his raw materials from
undertakers in New York and Pennsylvania. He paid them up to $1,000 per body,
court records show.

His company stripped bodies of their bones,
skin and other usable parts, then returned them to their families. The
families, ignorant of what happened, buried or cremated the evidence.

One of more than 1,000 bodies that were dismembered
was that of the famous BBC broadcaster and Masterpiece Theatre host Alistair
Cooke.

Products made from the stolen human remains
were shipped to Canada, Turkey, South Korea, Switzerland and Australia. More
than 800 of those products have never been located.

It later came out in court that some of the
tissue donors had died from cancer and that none had been tested for pathogens
like HIV and hepatitis.

Mastromarino falsified donor forms, lying about
causes of death and other details. He sold skin and other tissues to several
U.S. tissue-processing firms, including RTI.

“From day one, everything was forged;
everything, because we could. As long as the paperwork looked good, it was
fine,” said Mastromarino, who is serving a 25-to-58-year prison
sentence for conspiracy, theft and abuse of a corpse.

Strictly confidential

With so much competition for
American cadavers, some companies seek raw material overseas. That’s created a
fertile market in Eastern Europe for body brokers and other middlemen who can
help supply the tissue trade.

One of the middlemen was
Igor Aleschenko, a Russian coroner working in Ukraine. In
coordination with Ukraine’s ministry of health, he launched BioImplant, a
state-owned tissue procurement center to supply Tutogen, a German medical
products company.

Bioimplant supplied Tutogen with tissue. But Tutogen
executives raised internal questions as early as 2001 about whether it should
pull out of Ukraine, according to an internal memo marked “Strictly
Confidential!!!!”

Aleschenko was asking for more and more money to play
the role of intermediary between the regional satellite morgues around Ukraine
and Tutogen in Germany.

“The flow of money is difficult to track,”
the memo read. “Direct control over our resources is impossible.”

Staying in Ukraine would be high-risk, the authors
determined.

“We can’t control the activities of the
middlemen, and commitments are not being honored,” the memo said.

But the relationship did not stop.

Over time, 25 Ukrainian morgues registered with the
FDA. Since 2002, BioImplant and Tutogen have collectively exported to the
United States 1,307 shipments of tissue – mostly bone, skin and fascia sent
from Germany.

Families in Kyiv first began complaining to police in
2005 that a morgue that was supplying Tutogen’s needs was taking tissue without
proper consent. The criminal case was closed after an initial
investigation.  Prosecutors determined
that, under Ukrainian law, they couldn’t prove a crime had been committed if
they couldn’t prove that the tissue had been transplanted into someone, court
records show.

Three years later Ukrainian police investigated
another Tutogen supplier – this time in central Kryvij Rih. Those charges were
dropped after the director of the morgue died while the jury deliberated in his
criminal trial. Then in February of this year, the Security Service of Ukraine raided the Mykolaiv
morgue in southern Ukraine.

 

Inside Mykolaiv regional morgue in Ukraine, which was registered in the U.S. as a tissue bank.

Some families claimed they were tricked, pressured or
threatened into consenting. SBU said in some cases signatures had been
forged.

Aleschenko has reportedly slipped out of Ukraine for
his native Russia. The Ministry will not respond to questions about his
whereabouts.

Roman Hitchev, the founder of a major Bulgarian tissue
bank and now president-elect of the European Association of Tissue Banks, said
he was invited to Ukraine a few years ago at the request of the regional
government in Odessa. Officials wanted to operate a bank similar to that of
Tutogen suppliers in Kyiv. Hitchev said he left, unconvinced.

“They didn’t have legal infrastructure, laws.
Regulations were insufficient,” he said. “There was too much
vagueness, too much uncertainty concerning who’s responsible in terms of
control, traceability. I don’t like what I saw, and I just walked away.”

Global
sheriff

Each country has its own set of regulations for
the use of products made from human tissue, often based on laws that were
originally intended to deal with blood or organs.

In practice, though, because the U.S. supplies
an estimated two-thirds of the world’s human-tissue-product needs, the FDA has
effectively been left to act as sheriff for much of the planet.

Foreign tissue establishments that wish to
export products to the U.S. are required to register with the FDA.

Yet of the 340 foreign tissue establishments registered with the FDA, only about seven percent have an inspection record
in the FDA database, an ICIJ analysis shows. The FDA has never shut one down
due to concern over illicit activities.

The data also shows that about 35 percent of
active registered U.S. tissue banks have no inspection record in the FDA
database.

“When the FDA registers you, all you have to do
is fill out a form and wait for an inspection,” said Dr. Duke Kasprisin, the
medical director for seven U.S. tissue banks. “For the first year or two you
can function without having anyone look at you.”

This is backed by the data, which show the
typical tissue bank operates for nearly two years before its first FDA
inspection.

“The problem is there is no oversight. The FDA,
all they require is that you have a registration,” said Craig Allred, an
attorney previously involved in litigation against the industry. “Nobody is watching what is going
on.” The FDA and industry players “all point the finger at each other.”

Yet in South Korea, for example, the booming
plastic surgery market uses FDA oversight as a selling point.

In downtown Seoul, the country’s capital, Tiara
Plastic Surgery explains that human tissue products “are FDA-approved” and are therefore safe.

Some medical centers advertise “FDA-approved
AlloDerm” — a skin graft made from donated American cadavers — for nose enhancement.

Le Do-han, the official in charge of human
tissue for the South Korean FDA, said the country imports 90 per cent of its
human-tissue needs.

Raw tissue is shipped in from the U.S. and
Germany. This tissue, once processed, is often re-exported to Mexico as
manufactured goods.

Despite the complicated movements back and
forth, Le Do-han acknowledges that proper tracking hasn’t been put in place.

“It is like putting tags on beef, but I don’t
even know if that is possible for human tissues because there are so many
coming in.”

Teaming up

In its U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
filings, publicly traded RTI provides a glimpse of the company’s size and
global reach.

In 2011, the company manufactured 500,000 to
600,000 implants and launched 19 new kinds of implants in sports medicine,
orthopedics and other areas.  Ninety
percent of the company’s implants are made from human tissue, while 10 percent
come from cows and pigs processed at its German facility.

RTI requires its human body parts suppliers in
the U.S. and other nations to follow FDA regulations, but the company
acknowledges there are no guarantees.

In 2011 securities filings, RTI said there “can
be no assurances” that “our tissue suppliers will comply with such regulations
intended to prevent communicable disease transmission” or “even if such
compliance is achieved, that our implants have not been or will not be
associated with transmission of disease.”

Like many of today’s for-profit tissue
companies that were once non-profits, RTI broke away from the non-profit
University of Florida Tissue Bank in 1998.

Internal company files from Tutogen, a Germany medical products
company, show that RTI teamed up with Tutogen as early as September 1999 to
help both companies meet their growing needs for raw material by obtaining
human tissue from Eastern Europe.

The companies both obtained tissue from the
Czech Republic. Tutogen separately obtained tissues from Estonia, Hungary,
Russia, Latvia, Ukraine, and later Slovakia, documents show.

In 2002, allegations surfaced in the Czech
media that the local supplier to RTI and Tutogen was obtaining some tissues
there improperly. Though there is no suggestion that Tutogen or RTI or its
employees did anything improper.

In March
2003, police in Latvia investigated whether Tutogen’s local supplier had removed
tissue from about 400 bodies at a state forensic medical institute without
proper consent.

Wood and fabrics, replacing muscle and bone,
were put into the deceased to make it look like they were untouched before
burial, local media reported.

Police eventually charged three employees of
the supplier, but later dismissed the charges when a court ruled that no
consent from donors’ families was necessary. Again, there was no suggestion
Tutogen acted improperly.

In 2005, Ukrainian police launched the first of
a series of investigations into the activities of Tutogen’s suppliers in that
country. The initial investigation did not lead to criminal charges.

The relationship between Tutogen and RTI,
meanwhile, became even closer in late 2007, when they announced a merger
between the two companies. Tutogen became a subsidiary of RTI in early 2008.

Officials at RTI declined to answer questions
from ICIJ about whether it knew about police investigations of Tutogen’s
suppliers.

Two ribs

In 2008 Ukrainian police launched a new investigation, looking into allegations that more than 1,000
tissues a month were being illegally recovered at a forensic medical institute
at Kryvyj Rih and sent, via a third party, to Tutogen.  Joseph Düsel, the Chief Prosecutor in
Bamberg, said in 2009 that, “what the company is doing is approved by the
administrative authority by which it is also monitored. We do not currently see
any reason to initiate investigation proceedings.”

Nataliya Grischenko, the judge prosecuting the
case, revealed during subsequent court proceedings that many relatives claimed
they’d been tricked into signing consent forms or that their signatures had
been forged.

However, the main suspect in the case — a
Ukrainian doctor — died before the court could deliver a verdict. The case died
with him.

Tutogen “operates under very strict regulations
from German and Ukrainian authorities as well as other European and American
regulatory authorities,” the company said in a statement while the case was
still pending. “They have been inspected regularly by all of these authorities
over their many years of operation, and Tutogen remains in good standing with
all of them.”

Seventeen of Tutogen’s Ukrainian suppliers have
undergone an FDA inspection. The inspections are announced, according to
protocol, six to eight weeks in advance.

Only one — BioImplant in Kyiv — received
negative feedback. Among the findings of the 2009 inspection: not all morgues could
rely on hot running water and some sanitation procedures were not followed.

FDA inspectors also identified deficiencies
with RTI’s Ukrainian imports when it visited the company’s facilities in
Florida.

RTI had English translations, but not original
autopsy reports, from its Ukrainian donors, FDA inspectors found during a 2010 audit. Those were often the only medical documents
the company used to determine whether the donor was healthy, inspectors noted
in their report.

The company told inspectors it was illegal
under Ukrainian law to copy the report. But following the inspection it began
maintaining the original Russian-language document along with its English
translation.

In 2010 and 2011, FDA inspectors asked RTI to
change how it labeled its imports. The company was obtaining Ukrainian tissue,
shipping it to Tutogen in Germany, then exporting it to the U.S. as a product of Germany.

While the company agreed to change its
policies, there is some indication that it may have continued labeling some
Ukrainian tissue as German.

This past February SBU launched a raid as
officials at a regional forensic bureau in Mykolaiv Oblast were loading
harvested human tissues into the back of a white minibus. The footage of the
seizure shows tissue labeled “Tutogen. Made in Germany.”

Security services footage shows harvested human tissues in Ukraine labeled “Made in Germany”

In this case, the security service said
forensic officials had tricked relatives of the dead patients into agreeing to
what they thought was a small amount of tissue harvesting by playing on their
pain and grief.

Seized documents — blood tests, an autopsy report and labels written in English and obtained by
ICIJ — suggested the remains were on their way to Tutogen.

One of whose tissue fragments were found on the
bus came from 35-year-old Oleksandr Frolov, who had died from an epileptic
seizure.

“On the way to the cemetery, when we were in
the hearse, one of his feet — we noticed that one of the shoes slipped off his
foot, which seemed to be hanging loose,” his mother, Lubov Frolova, told ICIJ.

“When my daughter-in-law touched it, she said
that his foot was empty.”

Later, the investigators showed her a list of what had
been taken from her son’s body.

“Two ribs, two Achilles heels, two elbows, two
eardrums, two teeth, and so on. I couldn’t read it till the end, as I felt
sick. I couldn’t read it,” she said.

“I heard that [the tissues] were shipped to
Germany to be used for the plastic surgeries and also for donation. I have
nothing against donation, but it should be done according to the law.”

 

Oleksandr Frolov died of an epileptic attack days before Christmas. His tissue was found in a dingy minibus during a Ukrainian security service sweep in February

Kateryna Rahulina, whose 52-year-old mother
Olha Dynnyk, died in September 2011, was shown documents by investigators. The documents purported to give her approval for tissue to be taken
from her mother’s body.

“I was in shock,” Rahulina said. She never
signed the papers, she said, and it was clear to her that someone had forged
her approval.

On June 25, the police of Ukraine’s western town
of Ivano-Frankivsk launched a criminal case against the employees of the local
forensic bureau. Just as their Mykolaiv colleagues, the coroners allegedly tricked
the relatives into signing the consent forms for the organs and tissue removal,
while the forensic bureau didn’t have the license for this kind of activities, police claim. The
forensic bureau supplied BioImplant in Kyiv. The four suspects have been
detained.

The forensic bureau in Mykolaiv Oblast, where
the earlier alleged incidents happened, was, until recently, one of 20
Ukrainian tissue banks registered by the FDA. The Ivano-Frankivsk forensic
bureau registration with FDA is still active.

On the FDA’s website the phone number for each
of the tissue banks is the same.

It is Tutogen’s phone number in Germany.

Contributors to this
story: Sandra Bartlett, Joe Shapiro, Mar Cabra, Alexenia Dimitrova and Nari
Kim.