Tue May 13, 9:18 AM ET
By Gideon Long
LONDON (Reuters) - British pathologists removed the brains from tens of thousands of human corpses over a period of 30 years without the permission of the victims' relatives, the government acknowledged on Monday.
In a sinister reminder of scandals in the late 1990s, when hospitals were found to have secretly kept the hearts of dead children for research purposes, the government said the illicit removal of brains had been "widespread in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s."
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