Posted on 12/27/2005 2:55:40 AM PST by Wampus SC
Can I sell some of my husband parts if he's still alive?
Robin Cook wrote Coma.
I read a large percentage of Robin Cook books.
Now, the scary thing is, years ago, I worked for the Drug Regulatory Affairs of a LARGE pharmaceutical company.
One of the books were blatantly referring to the company I worked for. It referred to the research lab they had offshore as well to several people in high positions that were referenced with just their names slightly changed.
VERY scary.
Only if he's noncommunicative. Get that taken care of, and you can do as you please. Just remember that you have to claim those were his wishes. You don't have to be convincing, you just have to say it. The doctors, lawyers and judges will take it from there. Wait until after you get the money before you mention your husband's desire for you to run off to the Bahamas with the pool boy. Timing is everything. These things must be done delicately.
Only if he's noncommunicative.
Dern! My hubbie talks all the time. Thanks for the advice.
There are ways to shut him up, but I don't think you're up to the task. That's probably your parents' fault. They gave you a conscience, didn't they? Well, you're stuck with it now.
Over the years, I noticed that whatever Robin Cook wrote about, in about 2 years or less, a smart reporter would dig
up a real company and report that the same thing was happening there.
I started assuming years ago that Robin Cook had been talking to "Whistle Blowers", so had really been telling the truth in his book.
There were lists for the values aborted baby parts sold for, it has been years since I saw one.
That is a book waiting to be written, the real truth behind all the abortion clinics.
They are not as the fools think they are.
There you are, hilary and soros and abortions.
You know why the price of sKerry's brain is so high? Because it's never been used.
Here you go, take a look at this thread!
To me, any argument in favor of keeping and bearing arms is a good one. But I'm just one of those non-PC weirdos who believes the 2nd Amendment means what it says...
Not a chance as far as I am concerned. Only the poor would be the donars and what would their lives be worth and who would decide the definition of death needs to be updated and how fast would that happen. The definition is already too big a question for me to ever give my organs--but then, someone could very well steal the ones that do not need life support to "harvest". Our laws have made it so when one dies they are wisked away out of view; by parties unknown even to the family, i.e., hospital staff, coroner, funeral director, etc. Do you trust them? I don't.
BTTT
Thanks for pinging me back. I meant to add this article before....but I got distracted by the phone.
To add to what BykrBayb said - if he's communicative there are doctors who will guarantee he can't communicate anything. Either for the right price or because it's just what they do. Then you can say, "Look! He's not communicative! Carve away!". If you pick the right place, the most useful county employees will be overjoyed to back you up.
What brain???????
Body brokers
Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, May/Jun 2001 by Campbell, Ronald
From skin and bones to fat profits
One afternoon in September 1999 the medical school at the University of California Irvine made an odd announcement: The school was firing the head of its willed-body program for selling donated spines out the back door.
This wonderfully macabre story attracted a few weeks of media frenzy. By then, The Register and its competitors knew a great deal about Christopher Brown, the young mortician who had run the UCI program. We knew a lot about the people who had willed their bodies to science. We knew how critical donated bodies were to medical education.
What we didn't know was why anyone would pay cash for 80-year-old spines.
Answering that question took six months of reporting, writing and rewriting. In April 2000, we published "The Body Brokers," a five-part series describing how donated skin and bone had become the raw material for a $500 million industry.
Among our findings:
* Nonprofit tissue banks work hand-- in-glove with for-profit processors, often through exclusive contracts. Nonprofits are the industry's public face. For-profits work behind the scenes, turning human tissue into gold.
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* Tissue from a single donated human body can generate products worth a combined $222,000.
* Not one tissue bank tells families that their gifts will reap profits for others.
* Some of the for-profits trade on Wall Street and pay top dollar to their executives. As reporter Mark Katches wrote in a story about one such company when it went public: "You can now own a piece of a company that ultimately wants a piece of you."
* The profit motive ensures plenty of cadaver skin for processors while creating a shortage of skin for burn centers. Among the uses for scarce skin: vanity surgery to enhance lips and penises.
* The pressure to get more bodies is so strong that tissue bank employees and researchers occasionally take body parts without asking. A Red Cross employee in Arizona, who was later fired, forged a grieving father's initials on a form authorizing the harvesting of his daughter's bone.
* The Food and Drug Administration, the federal government's watchdog on the industry, doesn't know how many tissue banks exist. Six years after it began regulating the field, the FDA did not yet have a consistent set of standards for tissue banks.
* Although the FDA and the industry claim a near-perfect safety record for tissue products, they aren't looking very hard. We documented the case of a Colorado woman who died from Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (aka "Mad Cow Disease"), probably because of a tissue implant.
* Our series prompted the enactment of two laws in the California Legislature in 2000 as well as two reports by the inspector general of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, FDA's parent. In addition, the main tissue industry association urged its members to make more complete disclosures to donors and conducted a survey of members that confirmed there was a shortage of skin for burn victims.
Not so hidden story
In retrospect, perhaps the most surprising aspect of this oftensurprising story is that no one had done it before. Ads begging for organ and tissue donors are everywhere. Stories about organ donors and recipients are commonplace. Yet again and again, we found ourselves the first reporters ever to visit this tissue bank, the first to see that product being made, the first to ask detailed questions about the industry's finances and operations.
This story was hidden in plain sight.
But finding it wasn't easy. It took the combined efforts of three reporters (five initially), a graphic artist, a photographer and two editors. It also required a collective gut check. None of us wanted to discourage donations of vital organs, which are perpetually in short supply. We suspected - correctly, as it turned out - that we would be accused of doing just that.
Our strategy was to cast the widest possible net - finding and reading every document available on the trade, interviewing every executive who would talk, visiting every tissue bank or processor that would let us in the front door and tracking down dozens of donor families. Documents and interviews led to more documents and interviews. Eventually we would interview more than 300 people and review several thousand pages of documents.
I cannot overemphasize the value of getting - and reading - every document.
Early in our research we combed through the Internal Revenue Service database of nonprofits, identifying every group with "tissue" or "bone" or "skin" or "eye" in the name. That query produced about 100 names. We then asked the IRS for every Form 990 those groups had filed in the preceding five years.
The 990s tipped us to several partnerships with for-profits. We used the SEC EDGAR database to get quarterly, annual and proxy statements for those companies. The SEC forms in turn led us to competitors and yet more SEC documents.
Then we entered highlights from the 990s and SEC documents into a series of spreadsheets.
It was tedious work. But the payoff was profound. The 990s and SEC statements allowed us to document the rapid growth of the industry as well as the pay awarded to its top executives. When we reported that the founder of a small Los Angeles tissue bank was far and away the nation's best-paid nonprofit tissue banker, we had the facts to prove it.
The documents also gave us an exceptionally detailed list of the tissue industry's players. When reporter Bill Heisel surveyed the nation's bum centers to document a shortage of cadaver skin, he found that some burn centers didn't even know that nearby tissue banks were collecting and selling skin.
Donors in the dark
In January 2000, when we went on the road to visit tissue banks and processors around the country, documents already had answered our basic questions. That allowed us to concentrate on broader issues - why nonprofits and for-- profits were working so closely together, how the partnership made money and above all why no one wanted to tell donors.
The answer the industry gave to that last question was a paradox. First, they told us, the donors didn't care or didn't want to know about profits. Second, if we told them, they might care and stop donating. And no one wanted that.
Although the industry plainly was worried about us - the American Association of Tissue Banks sent its members an alert that we were investigating - most executives were quite open and proud of their accomplishments. Their cooperation made possible some stunning work by photographer Michael Goulding and graphic artist Sharon Henry.
The Freedom of Information Act proved less valuable than we had hoped. I filed the first of seven FOIA requests to the FDA in early November 1999. Responses to my principal request, for reports from nearly 200 tissue bank inspections, dribbled in for 15 months.
Part of the blame rests on the sheer number of FOIAs the FDA processes - 25,000 a year. But only part of the blame. The FDA aggressively deletes what it thinks is sensitive business data. FOIA officers made scores of deletions from virtually every document they sent me, blacking out donor ID numbers, names of business partners, even brand names of lab equipment.
Still, the FOIA requests ultimately bore fruit. The inspection reports showed that most tissue banks had been inspected only once in six years, if that often. Banks that were cited for severe deficiencies seldom got follow-up visits. The reports documented instances where tissue banks rejected other banks' tests and ignored FDA-sanctioned recalls.
Perhaps the most surprisingly productive resource for us was the Web. I don't mean authoritative sites like EDGAR. I mean the wild-and-woolly Web, America's gossip fence. Somewhere, perhaps, there is a Yellow Pages listing for skeleton suppliers. I don't know of any. But I do know about two Web sites that sell skeletons. And three sites that sell cadaver skin for cosmetic surgery. And lots of great sites where licensed plastic surgeons display before and after shots of lips, the "after" representing the happy results of a close encounter with skin from a dead body.
The Web also made possible one of the most poignant stories in our series. In early January 2000, 1 found a three-year-old SEC filing about the death of a Colorado woman from Creutzfeldt-- Jakob Disease, probably as the result of a tissue implant. My editor, Tracy Wood, insisted that I track the unidentified woman's family down.
I was sure it was impossible. It took about an hour.
Step 1: I visited a university-sponsored site about CJD.
Step 2: 1 linked to a memorial site, containing hundreds of brief tributes to CJD victims.
Step 3: About a hundred entries down the list, I began shaking - here was a woman who had died in the right place, Denver, at the right time, September 1996, at the right age, 39. Her name was Karen Kae Bissell. The next night I interviewed her mother. Mrs. Bissell said she had not even known that her daughter had received a tissue implant until medical investigators scoured Karen's records.
Chicago Tribune series
Web link to three-day series
www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/article/0,2669,2-46844,FF.html
Body Brokers ping. This thread and especially see post 99.
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