Up to 3,500 organs from dead children were kept by a Liverpool hospital without parental consent since the 1980s, an independent report into Alder Hey hospital is expected to reveal today.
The British government plans to change the law to ensure doctors obtain informed consent before removing organs.
It is understood the report will reveal that whole organ systems and stillborn babies were discovered preserved at Alder Hey and will raise questions about why individuals failed to inform on other staff involved in retaining organs.
A detailed picture of the scale of organ retention in the National Health Service will become clearer with the publication of a separate report by the Chief Medical Officer for England, Prof Liam Donaldson, today. His report is expected to say that more than half of England's large hospitals removed organs on a scale similar to that at Alder Hey.
The Alder Hey report will shake confidence in an already undermined profession and the government is keen to clear up confusion about consent by amending the Health and Social Care Bill to make it an offence to remove organs without consent.
Parents at Alder Hey signed consent forms, but often thought the removal of "tissue" meant small pieces of tissue, rather than whole organs. The Health Secretary, Mr Alan Milburn, who described the Alder Hey report as grotesque yesterday, said the government was not conducting a witch-hunt against the medical profession, but officials and doctors had to do more to prevent mistakes.
Indicating that the government favoured a change in the law on consent, Mr Milburn said: "Above all else, for trust to thrive there has to be informed consent - not a tick-in-the-box consent regime but consent that is based on discussion and dialogue, where consent is actively sought and positively given.
"We have to do more to prevent mistakes happening in the first place but we have to do something else too. We have to stop pretending that every mistake can be eliminated or that when something goes wrong in the NHS it renders the whole of the NHS wrong."
Prof John Lilleyman, president of the Royal College of Pathologists, said his colleagues felt beleaguered and insisted current laws on consent must change.
"We have got a muddled law, we have got sagging morale, everybody in a state of passion," he told BBC Radio 4's World at One programme. "Anything that would get us out of this morass would be welcome," he added.
The Liberal Democrat health spokesman, Mr Nick Harvey, offered his support for a change in the law on consent but said it was scandalous that it had taken so many years to stop a practice that most people thought had already ended.
"It is time to wipe the slate clean and restore public confidence in the patient-doctor relationship," he said.