Speechless.
Posted on 01/27/2006 5:25:09 PM PST by STARWISE
When it comes to the body, they say you can't take it with you when you die. But they didn't say it should be sold from the back of a truck. Or that you should not have the right to give a fully informed consent for whatever it is that medical science wants to do with your remains.
Recently it was revealed that a group of criminals was stealing bones from bodies at crematoriums in New York. They were then sold to for-profit tissue banks in New Jersey and Florida. Among the victims was the late host of PBS television's Masterpiece Theater, British broadcaster and journalist Alistair Cooke. His bones were removed without his or his family's permission or even knowledge, and then sold for thousands of dollars. What happened to Cooke has happened to others.
Investigations across the United States have revealed a gruesome market in body parts made possible by a motley collection of grim reapers who sometimes secretly and illegally and with dubious consent harvest the skin, bones, tendons, organs, and even brains of those in funeral homes, burial sites and morgues. From Maine to California to Louisiana, unscrupulous brokers are removing tissues and selling them to tissue banks which then sell them to medical schools, hospitals, research institutes and testing facilities. The trade in tissues is a half-billion dollar industry and that is enough to get some who have access to body parts to put their ethics on the shelf.
There is a long and ignoble history of pseudo-medical mutilation of bodies: William Burke and William Hare in the 19th century murdered and robbed graves to supply bodies for examination to the school of medicine in Edinburgh. A pathologist present at the Princeton, N.J., hospital where Albert Einstein died, removed Einstein's eyes and his brain, despite his specific instructions that he be cremated. The brain went off to Philadelphia, was divided into dozens of slices and preserved; it then spent the next 40 years being lugged around the United States by various doctors and speculators.
A friend of Elvis' barber in Memphis promises to make a clone of the King from his stash of slick black hair that he kept without Presley's knowledge. A San Francisco museum came under attack this year for its exhibit of the filleted bodies of what some said were Chinese prisoners who had been executed and who obviously had no chance to consent to their remains being put on display. Tulane University in Louisiana has admitted that it sold seven cadavers to a distributor who resold them for a sizable profit to the United States Army for use in land-mine testing.
It is one thing to fear death, but another to fear the desecration of a family member. Organ donation and much of the most important biomedical research depends on the generosity of donors, and that in turn depends on trust. The public will not support organ and tissue donation if Americans are worried that someone is getting away with stealing the parts of their loved ones.
And that would be a tragedy since organ and tissue donation save lives. It is time for the federal government to wake up and get involved in regulating the tissue trade before mistreating the dead starts to cost lives.There is record demand for organs and tissues from the dead.
Every year hundreds of thousands of tissue transplants are done. Most of these tissues are given in response to legitimate requests for their use from reputable organizations such as eye and skin banks. But, unlike organ procurement, which has strict oversight from the federal government, tissue procurement does not.
And there are sleazy operators out there among the many good guys ready to remove a bone from grandpa's leg at the funeral home or remove an entire brain at the morgue to send to a research institute without the fully informed consent of the donor or the family.
Research firms, pharmaceutical companies, government agencies and even the military have uses for almost every body part you can name. We now know how to use the dead to help the living. The public policy problem is that there is enough money changing hands that some who deal with the dead are dispensing with consent and yanking parts out of people who have given no indication that they wanted to be donors.
Tissue banks bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in the legal sale of parts from the deceased who have agreed that their bodies can be used as sources of bone and ligament which can be sterilized, shaped and transplanted to others.
But existing regulations and oversight are not enough. With so many people competing for the bodies of so few, and with lax laws governing the trade of tissues from the dead, it was inevitable that some who seem to have learned their dissection skills from watching "The Sopranos" would enter the business.
It is one thing to fear death, but another to fear the desecration of a family member.
Organ donation and much of the most important biomedical research depends on the generosity of donors, and that in turn depends on trust. The public will not support organ and tissue donation if Americans are worried that someone is getting away with stealing the parts of their loved ones. And that would be a tragedy since organ and tissue donation save lives.
It is time for the federal government to wake up and get involved in regulating the tissue trade before mistreating the dead starts to cost lives.
Arthur Caplan is director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Glenn McGee is director of the Alden March Bioethics Institute at Albany Medical Center.
Just Damn
Okaaaay, I want my body placed in the hole with the next underground nuclear test shot. :-)
Clunk!
Speechless.
Can you imagine???!!!
Ping.
FR Keyword Search = body brokers
Bump
Words fail me...
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