The Living Dead : how the human tissue & organ trade is prospering

international | crime and justice | opinion/analysis Sunday August 30, 2009 03:49 by iosaf

An excellent piece of investigative journalism from the German "Spiegel" magazine Martina Keller and Markus Grill has just been translated into English. It examines a US owned company which through its German subsidiary harvests human body parts (termed tissue) from dead Ukrainians. The illegal global trade in organ and tissue harvesting for so long associated in the public mind with the Chinese penal system and to a lesser extent the theft of organs from Indian peasants has not ended. Rather it has moved out of the gulags and slums into Wall Street trading on the cutting edge of medical treatment providers. The other side of Obama's health care, if you like. Inspired by the article (linked to in this text) I'd like to raise awareness about how the rich cheat the dead (if not death) & perhaps provoke thought amongst the agnostics, humanists, atheists amongst us about the moral value we place (if any) on dead bodies.

buy cheap then sell high - the capitalist way.... how much do you think you're worth dead?

Anyone who knows Dublin well will have at some stage passed a hostel on Camden Street, but many will not know that only a few centuries ago it was the site of an illegal trade which brought grave-robbers and medical students together. The history of anatomy and the dissection of corpses was one which negotiated the line between religious faith and scientific curiosity for centuries. Indeed for more than a millennium Christendom would not allow cremation of its adherents perhaps following imperial Roman customs that the bodies must be buried intact. The worst desecration of the dead was that reserved for criminals, decapitation. This stood much at odds with the funereal rites of the Egyptians who as know went to great trouble to ensure the “seven souls” which they believed occupied a living body could make it through the halls of judgement of the blind goddess Ma’at and get somewhere worth going (if only they were rich of course).

Then for a variety of reasons after the Enlightenment in Europe, people began to take wax casts of their important dead, thanks to which we have a host of death masks which allow us know what writers, composers, artists and scientists looked like just after they had breathed their last. The nineteenth century abounded with the curious habit of separating the heart of the illustrious from their bodies. So it is that Frederic Chopin’s remains are to be found thousands of kilometers apart with one heartless body in Père Lachaise Cemetery as was his wishes and his heart encased in a pillar of a Polish church (something which he never expressed as a wish).

Albert Einstein died on of April 18, 1955 at Princeton of a burst aortic aneurysm. His last wishes and will had specified that he wished his remains to be cremated and scattered. The pathologist in the hospital, Thomas Harvey, decided to remove his brain and eyes. His plan was to examine Einstein’s brain and discover why he had been so damned clever despite flunking school. Nobody had given him permission to remove the brain nor the eyes (which he gave to Einstein’s optician Henry Abrams) and pretty much everyone was shocked when he refused to give the brain back. Harvey lost his license to practice pathology and Abrams locked up Einstein’s eyes in a safe deposit box in NYC where rumour has it they remain to this day.

It is often believed that Harvey’s decision to rob Einstein’s brain was based on the much publicized research that had been carried out by the Soviet state who had taken the opportunity of examining the brain tissue of Lenin by comissioning a german scientist Oskar Vogt (born April 6, 1870 - July 30, 1959) to write a report which published in 1929 which claimed that some pyramidal neurons in the third layer of Lenin's cerebral cortex were very large. All that despite the fact that the leader of the Bolshevik revolution had left precise instructions that he didn’t want his body to be enshrined or revered which were promptly ignored and as I wrote in this back article ( http://www.indymedia.ie/article/72340 ) Of course the witty amongst us will remember he also mentioned he didn't want Stalin getting any important jobs in his will as well.

Those three cases of last wishes being ignored deal with famous indeed great men who changed history or culture or science. If we consider that those who harvested their tissue and organs did nothing more than desecrate their remains and undermine their dignity then we should have no problem understanding why the booming industry in tissue harvesting is a repugnant trade.

Of course some of us may just think “so what”. Neither Einstein’s nor Lenin’s brain were of any use without living bodies attached as it happens they both died from medical conditions which put in layperson’s terms would equate to “fucked brain”.
I’m not Dr House and neither are ye, but you’ll have to agree Einstein’s aneurysm and Lenin’s stroke weren’t really a promise of new theories of time travel or global revolution.

I’m not going to labour the point here. Regardless of whether you believe in the dignity of a dead body on religious grounds or you simply think you stop and nothing more – it is reprehensible that in a time when the right wing of the USA and its richest argue that adoption of Health Care for all would amount to “rationing of resources”, the richest simply get to harvest the good bits of dead bodies.

I have made no arrangements for after my death accept to mention cremation to a few close friends but after reading today’s translation of the Spiegel article, I am well tempted to write a will and testament specifying that no part of my body go to company which harvests tissue and sells it to rich people.

If I may not sell my kidney, skin, heart valves, liver, eyes or fine hair over Ebay or Google whilst I live, I see no reason some corporation can sell my dead body to help some rich fucker cheat death a while longer.


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Some links of interest :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repugnant_market

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_transplant#Living_or...eased

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunther_von_Hagens
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomy_Act_of_1832
http://www.intute.ac.uk/cgi-bin/browse-keyword.pl?jacs=...10785

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Beinwunder_Cosmas_und...n.jpg


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The Spiegel Article By Martina Keller and Markus Grill is lengthy but really worth a read, here follows the opening paragraph of a four part feature which exposes the booming industry in "tissue", the ethical evasions used and the horrid euphemism "raw material".

"Inside a Creepy Global Body Parts Business"
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,64537....html

The German company Tutogen's business in body parts is as secretive as it is lucrative. It extracts bones from corpses in Ukraine to manufacture medical products, as part of a global market worth billions that is centered in the United States. Anatoly Korzhak, a pensioner and former engineer, died in Kiev on August 5, 2004. His body was picked up at 2 a.m. and taken to the forensic medicine institute in the Ukrainian capital. That same night, Korzhak's daughter, Lena Krat, received a telephone call and was asked to come to the institute immediately in the morning, where she was told she would receive further information. It was the first time Krat was confronted with the death of a close relative. "I was so upset that I couldn't think clearly," she recalls. When she arrived at the institute in the morning, a man there said something to her about skin transplants. He was an employee of a Ukrainian company that works hand-in-hand with forensic medicine experts. She said to the man: "Leave me alone. I don't understand what you're talking about, and I don't want to listen to you." But the employee was persistent and eventually gave her a form to sign. He told her that if she consented to skin removal, she would be helping pediatric burn victims who needed transplants. Krat signed the form. "It was as if I had been hypnotized," she says. But now Krat, a mother of two young girls, has learned from SPIEGEL that the Ukrainian company in question sends the body parts to a German company, Tutogen Medical GmbH, which in turn apparently supplies large numbers of such parts to the American tissue market. In addition to strips of skin, tendons, bones and cartilage are removed from the bodies. "This shocks me," says Krat. "If I had known that so much is cut out, I would never have given my consent."

read the rest at http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,64537....html