Undergraduate students will not be allowed to use cadavers once the medical building opens in fall 2009.
James Swan, director of Anatomy and Physiology, said the cadavers will no longer be available because the administration decided to give the space for the cadaver lab to other health departments.
He said this will deprive undergraduate students of a quality education.
"The medical school is denying us the use of them because they don't want us to have the space," Swan said. "You have to have very specialized ventilated space to use cadavers, and the medical school had promised us a space in the new building that they're working on now - it's called Education Phase II - but they now have other things that they want to use that space for. So, that's the real issue. It's not so much money for the cadavers. It's money for facilities."
Paul Roth, executive vice president of the Health Sciences Center, said undergraduates don't need experience with cadavers to be accepted into UNM's medical program.
Roth said the space for the cadavers is being taken away
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because it is unethical to allow students to use cadavers when they haven't been accepted into a medical or nursing program.
"The building was designed originally to accommodate undergraduate cadaver use, but the medical school has - and I think nationally it's also the case - decided that the indiscriminate use of cadavers is frowned upon and considered to be somewhat unethical," he said. "The only people, from our perspective, that should be handling human remains are people who have already made a commitment and have been accepted to a health-professional school."
Student Santos Abeyta, an undergraduate biology major, said he intends to apply to UNM's medical program. He said he is concerned the restrictions on cadaver use will affect how students perform once they are accepted to medical school.
Abeyta said UNM undergraduates will have to rely heavily on A.D.A.M., a software program that simulates dissections.
"It's supposed to give you a layered view of the human body, and that's really not adequate," Abeyta said.
Roth said the use of cadavers will be restricted to students who have already been accepted to the medical or nursing program.
"The space that would have been allocated to the undergraduate use of cadavers will be converted to other classes and into other classroom space which can accommodate not just medical students but nursing students and pharmacy students," Roth said.
Abeyta said undergraduates will be hindered by not having hands-on experience with cadavers.
"We'll be stuck using charts and just basically our books and whatever we can get our hands on," Abeyta said. "But those only help so much. They don't show you the true depth. They don't show you the way things really are. They just show you an idealistic view."
Swan said undergraduate students shouldn't be expected to rely on books and plastic models for their education.
"We do have models, and we do have slides and things like that, and we do have computer programs, but the cadavers are the only way that they really effectively learn detailed human anatomy," he said.
Swan said UNM will sacrifice its competitive edge if it restricts cadaver use to health-professional students only.
"If we lose the cadavers ... then we will be noncompetitive with even the local schools," he said. "CNM uses cadavers. The other branches of UNM at Valencia, and I think at Gallup, also use cadavers, so we won't even be competitive with them."
