A catalogue of dubious practices has been exposed today by a report into how organs came to be removed illegally from the dead bodies of British nuclear workers for testing without proper consent.

Chris Huhne, the Secretary of State for Energy & Climate Change, said the events detailed in today’s publication of the Redfern Inquiry “should never have happened in the first place”.

Lawyer Michael Redfern was appointed in 2007 to investigate how tissues from nuclear workers were removed and analysed between 1955 and 1992. His inquiry found that organs from workers at a number of nuclear sites were removed and taken for analysis at the Sellafield nuclear facility. Other samples were taken from members of the public, some of whom lived near nuclear sites and others selected at random.

“Organs were removed at post mortem and provided for analysis despite being of no possible relevance to the cause of death,” says the final report of the inquiry. “The results of radiochemical analysis were seldom taken into account when the death was certified: they were important not for the coronial investigation but primarily for research.”

Body parts are only supposed to be removed by coroners if they may relate to the cause of death, unless permission is sought.

Redfern places most of the blame on pathologists who performed the post mortems at which organs were removed without satisfying themselves that consent from relatives had been given.

In a statement, Peter Furness, president of the Royal College of Pathologists, says, “We believe that the work was undertaken in good faith, in the understanding that it was work with potential to benefit the population of the UK as a whole. Nevertheless, we fully acknowledge that post mortem tissue should not have been removed in this way. We deeply regret that the discovery that tissue was removed without knowledge or consent has caused distress to the bereaved.”

The main researcher involved in the work at Sellafield was Geoffrey Schofield, the medical officer at Sellafield until his death in 1985, who was succeed by Adam Lawson, who also worked at Sellafield. The Redfern Inquiry says Schofield “appears to have taken somewhat dubious steps to obtain organs” and that there is no evidence that either Schofield or Lawson “gave any thought at all to the ethical implications of his work”. It also notes that they did not attempt to conceal their work and that it was “not fully appreciated” that the law did not allow removal of organs for research without obtaining relatives’ consent.

Data on some of the organs were sent to United States in an “obvious breach of confidence”, says the report.

Some of the data obtained in these tests have already been used to improve a formula used to calculate radiation exposure for nuclear workers. Despite the circumstances in which it was gathered, the inquiry decided against destroying the data, as requested by some families.

“The Inquiry acknowledges their deeply felt concerns but believes that destruction would be inappropriate: the data are potentially of great benefit to those working in the nuclear industry and should be made available, anonymised, for use in appropriate research,” says the report.

Since the events detailed in the report, the UK passed new legislation in the form of the 2004 Human Tissue Act that tightened regulations on the use of human tissues. “I hope that the families of those involved can take some comfort from the knowledge that the practices that this Inquiry examined simply would not be permissible today,” said Huhne.