An unusual gold rush hits hits Med School anatomy class

It wasn't quite the mother lode, but it still would have made a prospector proud. While dissecting the head and neck of his cadaver "Hal" Wednesday morning, first-year Medical School student Michael Agus found that the dearly departed gentleman had a gold tooth. But yesterday, Agus made another find. "Tonight when we continued the dissection I looked in [the mouth] and saw that the tooth was gone," he said last night. After Agus announced the missing gold to his lab partners, classmate Tad Dibbern, another first-year Med student, remembered that his cadaver had similar dental work. And it soon became apparent that Hal wasn't the only stiff to be visited by the aspiring tooth fairy. "I said, 'We have two gold teeth, too,' " Dibbern said. "But when I checked, I saw they were gone." But when students checked a third body which was known to have had gold teeth, they found the treasures intact. Dibbern speculated that a set of dentures which had been placed above the teeth "as a joke" may have deterred the thief. "Underneath, there was an entire gold bridge with six or eight gold teeth that no one had touched," Dibbern said. According to Gary Cohen, a clinical associate professor of oral medicine, the three swiped caps could have netted the swiper somewhere between $60 and $120. "Gold teeth usually weigh between one-tenth and one-fifth of an ounce," Cohen said. "If you took them to a smelter or a jeweler you probably would get between $20 and $40 per tooth." Although a University Police officer was sent to the anatomy laboratory, no incident report was filed, according to Sergeant Lawrence Salotti. According to Agus, the officer who came to investigate the crime asked him for the name of the complainant, so Agus told him "Hal." "I don't know his name, but we call him Hal," Agus said. The professor of the class, Associate Anatomy Professor John Weisel, said he was upset by the whole incident. "I think it's really unfortunate -- one of the things we teach is respect of the cadavers which have been donated," said Weisel. "It is unfortunate that someone would desecrate these bodies."

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