Big Business in Body Parts

If you are faint hearted or stories of blood and bones give you chill or migraine, you should not read the story at Los Angeles Times published a few days ago. Link is here in case you feel brave to trudge along cadaver, body snatcher and news of making millions of dollar in profit from human bones and flesh by the Biotechnology companies. Link: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-howley6mar06,0,3271134.story?coll=la-opinion-center

Read the following extract:

Modern medicine has come to rely on a steady supply of products generated from the tissues of the dead. Organs are allocated to recipients by a medical bureaucracy, so there is no legal commercial market in them. But heart valves, tendons, ligaments and the like are all transplantable, and they all fetch a price. Osteotech Inc., another New Jersey company, grinds human bone into a putty used to patch small breaks. Skeletal grafts help cancer patients replace arm and leg bone lost because of illness. And it's not all borne of medical necessity. Ask your plastic surgeon for a pair of plumper lips, and you may get a shot of human-derived Alloderm.

The disturbing part is how the altruistic donors do not have any clue how their own tissues are getting used in profit making not for the "miracles", and perhaps that also does not make them a "hero" either -->

Donors, assured that they're providing the "gift of life," likely assume that the system is as altruistic as they are. Tissue procurement organizations have a story they sell to donors, and it's one of medical miracles, not booming businesses. As the Ohio Department of Health explains on its donor recruitment website: "Through … tissue donation everyday citizens, just like you, have a chance to make a difference. To be a life saver. To be a hero."

Well, that's half the story, and here's the rest: Within the biotech world, miracles and business are one and the same. There is nothing inherently wrong with biotech companies reselling donated tissues. Think of it this way: The Salvation Army — hardly a bastion of greed — sells donated secondhand clothes. Resale is often the best way to get donations to people who need them.

Then again, if you decide to skip the donation bin and sell your outdated suit on your own terms, no politician will stop you. The same should be true for tissue. But federal law has one set of rules for tissue donors and another for businesses.

The interesting part is "Low estimates put the present value of a single cadaver at $100,000. But in the current system, only someone else could get that money. The legal resale value of your body, to you, is precisely $0."

There are "objections" in making "your body" roll into real market capitalism where "you" will have the say and even share the profit of selling your "cadaver" tissue. "Ethicists and policymakers worry that letting donors (or more precisely their heirs) profit from the market would encourage predatory behavior. But we've seen that behavior — from tissue procurement organizations looking to make a buck within the shadows of a gray market. Recent body-snatching scandals demonstrate the dangers of keeping this trade underground. In a transparent and regulated tissue market, plundering bodies would be harder — not easier — to do."

Delicacy indeed! Even in death and cold corpses, market capitalism (fundamentalism?) keeps rolling on beyond grave, churning metallic coins out of bloody tissues and bones!

Read the full article from the following link:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-howley6mar06,0,3271134.story?coll=la-opinion-center

Regards,
Mahbubul Karim (Sohel)

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