WEDNESDAY, FEB. 27, 2002
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN = 7A
Crematory worker faces more criminal charges
The Associated Press
LAFAYETTE, Ga. — Authorities filed 100 more criminal charges yesterday against the operator of a crematory where hundreds of corpses have been discovered.
Ray Brent Marsh already faced 16 counts of theft by deception for allegedly taking money for cremations he never performed at Tri-State Crematory.
The 100 additional theft by deception charges were filed by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and issued in a warrant by Walker County Magistrate Judge Shelia Thompson.
The new counts were connected to 50 of the corpses found at Tri-State. For each body, one count was filed for taking money from the families and another for failing to give the ashes to the families, officials said.
So far, 339 corpses have been found on the crematory
grounds. Only 70 of the bodies have been identified.
Gov. Roy Barnes was notified yesterday that the Federal Emergency Management Agency would not give the state money for clean-up. FEMA Director Joe Allbaugh said "an emergency declaration is neither appropriate nor warranted."
Officials have said they could not estimate the cost of the clean-up until all the bodies had been recovered,but said they thought that it would surpass $10 million.
Also yesterday, the House unanimously voted to make it a felony to abandon a body intended for cremation or burial. The bill now goes to the Senate.
The latest charges were filled just hours after a separate judge ruled Marsh could leave jail on $100,000 bond on the original 16 theft charges. Marsh was still in jail yesterday afternoon and could be arrested again if he makes bail.
Meanwhile, recovery work
ers began another day of clearcutting the 16-acre crematory grounds.
Authorities have said it could be late summer before all the bodies are identified. Some workers are growing weary and occasionally sick as the emotional toll mounts.
Officials estimated they had searched only three or four acres of the Tri-State grounds, which comprise at least eight acres, excluding buildings and a small lake. Authorities are working on a plan to drain the lake.
"Everybody involved in this process, from the word go, is suffering some kind of emotional strain," said David Ashburn, the Walker County emergency director. "It's things that you and I were never meant to be exposed to."
Family members lined up Monday to give blood samples, hoping their DNA would help investigators identify more bodies.
Screening knocks out bad gene
CHICAGO — In what is believed to be a medical first, a woman with a gene that is all but certain to cause Alzheimer's by her 40s gave birth to a baby free of the defect after having her eggs screened and selected in the laboratory.
The Associated Press
Experts said it appears to be the first time pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD, has been used for early-onset Alzheimer's. There is no similar test for the more typical form of Alzheimer's, which strikes the elderly.
PGD, which can also involve the testing of early embryos, has been used to screen for other devastating diseases such as Tay-Sachs and sickle-cell anemia, which strike in early childhood. It is less commonly used to detect diseases that strike adults.
Medical ethicists said the latest milestone raised troubling issues, among them the rights of parents with disabling diseases to have children.
The patient, a 33-year-old married geneticist who had the procedure about two years ago, desperately wanted children, even though Alzheimer's will probably steal her mind long before her daughter grows up.
"Today it's early-onset
The woman was wellinformed of the ramifications, said her doctor, geneticist Yury Verlinsky. A PGD pioneer at Chicago's Reproductive Genetics Institute, Verlinsky described his patient's procedure at a news conference yesterday. A report on the case appears in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.
The patient, whose name was not released, has a brother and sister who developed Alzheimer's in their 30s. Tests showed that she had a mutation called V717L that had been found to lead to the formation of the brain-clogging protein deposits that are a hallmark of Alzheimer's.
Alzheimer's. Tomorrow it could easily be intelligence, or a good piano player or many other things we might be able to identify the genetic factors for," said Jeffrey Kahn, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Bioethics. "The question is whether we ought to."
The woman underwent invitro fertilization, in which eggs are fertilized in the lab and implanted in the womb. But first, the eggs were examined to find those that were free of the mutant gene.
Her daughter was born about a year ago. The woman is pregnant again after undergoing another round of testing.
Using PGD for early-onset Alzheimer's is "the only relief for at-risk couples," Verlinsky said. He said he would not screen for gender or other "cosmetic" reasons, but otherwise did not pass judgment on which patients he will test.
PGD is not widely available, partly because the defects it tests for are generally rare. It is also tricky to perform. Verlinsky said PGD procedures, developed in the late 1980s, had resulted in about 700 babies worldwide. His clinic has done about 2,000 PGD procedures, resulting in over 200 babies.
"It's not our place to make a moral decision for them," he said.
The Alzheimer's-related flaw is probably present in only a dozen or so families worldwide, and afflicted patients are virtually assured of developing early-onset Alzheimer's, experts said.
Kahn said PGD was an unregulated, market-driven area of science.
PGD costs about $2,500 at Verlinsky's clinic. His patient had to undergo two rounds of tests because eggs tested the first time both had the V717L flaw. The cost does not include the clinic's $7,500 fee for in-vitro fertilization.
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