A family called today for the prosecution of Oxford doctors who removed their dead son's brain and threw it away as medical waste.

Paul and Barbie Clynes spoke out after it was revealed that Oxford hospitals had the second highest number of human organs in storage.

A total of 4,400 brains have been collected over the past 30 years at the Radcliffe Infirmary for teaching and research.

Hospital officials accepted that many families would not have been aware that brains had been removed from their loved ones.

Mr and Mrs Clynes, of Woodfield, Banbury, knew their son Marc's brain had been removed during a post-mortem examination at the John Radcliffe Hospital, but had been told it had been replaced before the funeral.

It was 15 years before they realised that it had been stored.

They are demanding a full inquiry and the prosecution of the doctors involved.

Nationally, it has been revealed that thousands of dead patients, many of them children, have been dismembered and stripped of their internal organs without relatives' consent.

Liverpool's Alder Hey children's hospital topped the league for retaining organs. Prof Dick van Velzen, the pathologist responsible for removing organs there, now faces a life ban and possible prosecution.

Health Secretary Alan Milburn has promised urgent changes.

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