Scott Carney, Inside the Business of Selling Human Body Parts
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| Scott Carney | Inside the Business of Selling Human Body Parts |
SCOTT CARNEY, an investigative journalist, has published articles in publications from Mother Jones to Foreign Policy. His work often focuses on South Asia, including India, which he first visited as a college student in 1998. The following information, which appeared in more visual form in Wired magazine, is based on research for his book The Red Market (2011).
1Is the human body sacred? Or is it a commodity ready to be chopped up and exposed to the forces of supply and demand? The answer is a matter of perspective. Our own body is a temple. But when we need a spare part, suddenly we’re surprisingly open to a transaction. To a person looking for a kidney, a scientist trying to learn anatomy, a beauty parlor customer looking for the perfect ’do, there’s no substitute for a piece of someone else.
2The problem is, demand for replacement flesh grossly outstrips supply. In the US and like-minded countries, it’s illegal to sell body parts1—they can be taken only from those who filled out a donor card before they died or who are willing to give up an organ out of sheer benevolence. This means there isn’t enough tissue to go around. So, as with any outlawed or heavily regulated resource, a bustling underground trade has formed.
3Sometimes the market in body parts is exploitive: Desperate people are paid tiny sums for huge donations. Other times it is ghoulish: Pieces are stolen from the recently dead. And every so often, the resource grab is lethal—people are simply killed for their organs. Welcome to the red market.
| Price | India (per pint) | $25 |
| U.S. (per pint) | $337 | |
| Source | Legal | Blood donors |
| Illegal | Paid blood donors, blood farmers | |
| Description: Until the 1970s, for-profit blood-collection centers were located in almost every poor neighborhood, somewhat like payday loan centers are today. This changed after a study showed that paid donations encourage lax standards. As a result, the rules were modified and blood and organs can no longer be sold. At least not here. In the developing world, there are still profits to be made. In 2008, blood thieves in India were busted for keeping people prisoner and milking their blood up to three times a week. Some captives had been held for more than two years. | ||
Table 5.29: BLOOD
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| Price | $308 | |
| Average U.S. retail (for a set of extensions) | ||
| Source | Legal | Indian temples, donations, direct sales |
| Illegal | N/A | |
| Description: Every year, millions of pounds of hair are given to the Lord Venkateswara at the Tirumala temple in South India. The temple sells these donations to the West, where they become raw material for the US hair-extension industry. Indian hair is valued for its length and the fact that the average Indian doesn’t use damaging products. The temple makes about $12 million a year in sales, which translates to hundreds of millions at the salon level. There are also secondary markets for human hair. Lesser manes, for example, are sent to factories and boiled down into enzymes that help soften the dough of many baked goods. | ||
Table 5.30: HAIR
| Price | $24,400 | |
| Implanted (in the U.S.) | ||
| Source | Legal | Deceased donors |
| Illegal | Mortuaries | |
| Description: Corneas are relatively easy to transplant and easy to ship. This makes for a brisk international market, and cryo packages zip across the globe to needy eyeballs everywhere. Donation rates exceed demand in the US, so we are actually a net exporter of corneas. But overseas, the market is far from orderly. In 2001, a former Chinese surgeon testified before the US Congress that he had harvested hundreds of corneas (along with kidneys and skin) from more than a hundred executed Chinese prisoners. The United Nations has discussed trying to put an end to international organ brokering, but so far the global market remains unregulated. | ||
Table 5.31: CORNEAS
| Price | Legal | $997,700 |
| Illegal | $119,000 | |
| Source | Legal | Deceased donors |
| Illegal | Chinese prisoners | |
| Description: Black-market heart transplants are extremely rare, if only because putting in a new ticker requires a state-of-the-art medical facility, and these tend to be highly fastidious about organ donation. While one hospital manager in Saudi Arabia told Wired that there’s a black market for transplants in that country, there is no evidence of an actual operation ever taking place. The few known nonconsensual donations that do occur once again tend to come from Chinese prisoners and Falun Gong practitioners, according to the UN. | ||
Table 5.32: HEARTS
| Price | Legal | $557,100 |
| Illegal | $157,000 | |
| Source | Legal | Living donors, deceased donors |
| Illegal | Executed prisoners, Filipino slum dwellers | |
| Description: The liver is amazingly resilient;2 even a badly damaged one can fully regenerate on its own. But when there’s an excessive buildup of scar tissue, a person will need a transplant. The good news is that a patient may not need a whole new organ: Because of the liver’s fortitude, just a healthy lobe may be enough. This means living donors are possible. The bad news is that, for the living donor, recovery can be excruciating, so donors aren’t common. Executed Chinese prisoners are one source of black-market livers. Or organ brokers can set you up in the Philippines, where illicit donations likely come from those desperate for cash. | ||
Table 5.33: LIVERS
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| Price | India | $15,000 |
| China | $62,000 | |
| U.S. | $262,900 | |
| Source | Legal | Living donors, deceased donors |
| Illegal | Paid donors, executed prisoners | |
| Description: Don’t have years to wait for a kidney in the US? Finding an international source is easy. In fact, two US insurance companies will sometimes even pay for you to go abroad. Outside the US, however, a kidney’s origin can be difficult to discern. According to a Council of Europe report, for example, a clinic with ties to senior Kosovo officials engaged in an organ harvesting ring as recently as 2008. And in China, an investigation found that people on death row are routinely tested, typed, and held for on-demand “donations.” Then there are India, Pakistan, and Indonesia, where slum dwellers are lured into selling their innards for a pittance. | ||
Table 5.34: KIDNEYS
| Price | U.S. | $12,400 |
| per IVF cycle (in the U.S.) | ||
| Source | Legal | Egg donors |
| Illegal | Egg sellers | |
| Description: Egg donation is legal in the US, but getting one (or more) is going to cost you in fees and hospital charges. That said, would-be buyers can also look abroad for deals. The Mediterranean island nation of Cyprus is one destination with a burgeoning illegal trade in human eggs. Clinics there have flown in impoverished women from Russia and Ukraine for aggressive egg harvesting, returning them before complications can arise. The deal can save a client up to 40 percent on in vitro fertilization services. Other egg-harvesting programs in Romania, Spain, and Israel offer similar deals. | ||
Table 5.35: EGGS
| Price | India | $20,000–30,000 |
| U.S. | 80,000–150,000 | |
| Source | Legal | Fertility clinics |
| Illegal | Ferity clinics | |
| Description: India—the outsourcing capital of the world—is the go-to place for getting someone else to grow you a child. Tucked away in an industrial dairy town in Gujarat, for example, the Akanksha Infertility Clinic offers a complete surrogacy program for just $23,000—a fraction of what people pay in the West. The clinic achieves a surprisingly high success rate by transferring five or six embryos to women who sign up for the program (sometimes resulting in sets of twins and the prenatal developmental complications they entail) and by keeping the surrogates on lockdown for the nine months that they gestate. | ||
Table 5.36: WOMB RENTALS
| Price | $45,730–77,560 per body | |
| Source | Legal | Donated cadavers |
| Illegal | Chinese prisoners | |
| Description: In the late 1970s, Gunther von Hagens revolutionized the study of anatomy by changing the way specimens were prepared. Instead of immersing dead bodies in a preservative, he replaced their fat and water with polymer, turning corpses into plastic statues. Plastination exposed the body’s internal structures and greatly enhanced researchers’ ability to study them. It also led to several traveling exhibition shows. An investigation into those shows revealed that many bodies were likely coming from executed prisoners. | ||
Table 5.37: PLASTINATES
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| Price | $5,465 for an ACL reconstruction | |
| Source | Legal | Deceased donors |
| Illegal | Mortuaries | |
| Description: Most organs become useless soon after the owner dies. The key exceptions are ligaments and bone. Funeral parlors in the US have been implicated in stealing these less perishable body parts and selling them without permission to tissue banks. According to a recent criminal investigation, for example, between 2004 and 2005 a company named Biomedical Tissue Services illicitly harvested 244 bodies from Philadelphia mortuaries. Since tissue banks are not set up to monitor whether parts come from fraudulent sources, it is difficult to know how many donation recipients carry contraband inside their bodies. | ||
Table 5.38: LIGAMENTS AND BONES
| Price | $10 per square inch | |
| Source | Legal | Deceased donors |
| Illegal | Mortuaries | |
| Description: If a burn or an ulcer leaves a hole in your body that’s too big to stitch, the best option is to patch it up with extra skin—preferably your own. In a pinch, however, someone else’s will do. There aren’t a lot of people willing to donate living skin, so most grafts are taken from dead bodies—either legally from organ donors or, like ligaments and bone, illegally from funeral parlors. The danger of cadaver harvesting is that the skin is not always as sanitary as it should be. In the Biomedical Tissue Services case, workers hacked at body after body without washing their hands, sending potentially infected samples to tissue banks. | ||
Table 5.39: SKIN
| Price | $2,993–5,500 | |
| Source | Legal | Donated cadavers |
| Illegal | Indian graves | |
| Description: There was a time when every doctor in training received a full set of human bones along with their first-year textbooks. These bones usually came from Calcutta, which produced almost 60,000 skeletons a year. But in 1985 the practice of exporting human parts was banned, and there aren’t a lot of good, legal sources of medical skeletons anymore. Today, black-market skeletons pilfered from graves in India are cleaned in acid baths, smuggled out of the country, and sold at a premium through brokers in Canada. | ||
Table 5.40: SKELETONS
1Major, Rupert W. L. “Paying Kidney Donors: Time to Follow Iran?” McGill Journal of Medicine. 11 (1): 67–69. Web.
2Edwards, Steven. “Adult Stem Cells Regenerate Liver Tissue.” Wired. Condé Nast, 27 Mar. 2007. Web. 26 June 2012.